AMD shows more than serious intentions of building the next generation of low-power mobile processors-- Apple chip designer Jim Keller joins the company as corporate VP and chief AMD microprocessor core architect.
Keller is former Apple platform architecture group director, where he led development of several generations of iDevice processor designs. Prior to Apple Keller was VP of design at fabless semiconductor design firm P.A. Semi, a company bought by Apple in 2008 for $278 million. He is also the co-author of the HyperTransport specification, as well as the x86-64 processor instruction set.
Keller already has a bit of a history with AMD-- he helped design the AMD Athlon 64 and Opteron 64 processors around 10 years ago.
At AMD Keller reports to AMD CTO Mark Papermaster, another ex-Apple hire.
The news follows another mobility-related AMD announcement-- AMD now licenses ARM designs (specificallly the ARM Cortex-A5) in order to add security features to its next generation of mobile processors.