Tesla hires former Apple, AMD chip guru to improve self-driving cars

If anyone can do it, it’s Keller. He’s been a significant semiconductor engineer for more than two decades now. At AMD, he was involved in the creation of the Athlon architecture, the HyperTransport interface, and the first native x86 64-bit architecture, which resulted in the Athlon 64 processor. He left AMD for Broadcom and then PA Semi, which Apple purchased. He was involved in the development of Apple’s A4 and A5 SoCs introduced in the iPhone and iPad. He returned to AMD in 2012 to lead the development of the Zen microarchitecture, which is on pace for release later this year. AMD has pinned its hopes on Zen to pretty much save its skin, as its current microarchitecture barely competes with Intel’s best.