Jim Keller, AMD's legendary CPU architect, left the company last month. The company's spokesperson stated that he had completed all his work, and his departure wouldn't affect the company's roadmap or future plans. Keller never revealed why he left AMD or where he will start working next. Now, it is being rumoured that Keller might join Samsung to develop the company's next-generation mobile processors.
According to a post on Weibo, Keller will join Samsung's R&D department in Austin Texas. It is being expected that he will play an important role in improving Samsung's Exynos line-up of mobile processors. He played a major role in the development of AMD's popular K7 and K8 processors, and the company was giving a tough competition to Intel then. He was also involved in the development of the first native 64-bit processor architecture for AMD. What's even more interesting is that he joined Apple to work on A4 and A5 SoCs before returning to AMD in 2012.
We all know that Samsung has been focussing on its Exynos line-up of application processors, and it was the first to release mobile processors that were fabricated using industry-leading 14nm FinFET process. The South Korean electronics giant also manufactures RAM and NAND chips, and Keller would be an interesting addition to its R&D team. This is an interesting development, but just a rumour as of now, so you should take it with a pinch of salt and wait for some official information.
