AMD has poached the director of Apple’s mobile-focused Platform Architecture Group Jim Keller, credited with architecting several generations of the ARM-based chips found in the iPad, iPhone, iPod and Apple TV.
It will be Keller’s second go-round at AMD. He was there years ago working on the Athlon 64 and Opteron 64 processors that featured the world’s first native x86-64 bit architecture, a scheme Intel was forced to follow.
He also co-authored AMD’s HyperTransport specification and the x86-64 instruction set.