Jim Keller leaves AMD again – How will it impact AMD Zen?

Originally Jim Keller is the person who designed the AMD K7 and K8 architecture which helped the firm gain market share, leaves AMD once again. His first leave was 3 years after the K7 launched and 3 years before the K8 was launched.

Then Jim Keller moved to Apple to help them design their own processor for the iPhone and the iPad. Later Jim Keller rejoined AMD once again in 2012 to be a part of the overhaul to design the new CPU architecture replacing Bulldozer, codenamed as AMD Zen.

Jim Keller again leaves the firm and the team responsible for the new CPU architecture will be led by another former Apple executive, Mark Papermaster.

So how will this effect the upcoming AMD Zen launch this 2016 and AMD Zen+ this 2018/2019? We have no idea. The AMD Zen design is based on K8 and supposedly increases IPC by up to 40% over the Excavator microarchitecture. Thus the AMD Zen+ is suggested to have a 15% IPC increment.

If the AMD Zen+ still in the research stage, there lies the possibility that it will not have much of Jim Keller’s secret recipes.

SOURCE : Bloomberg

Pokdepinion : I do remember when the AMD Phenom line up was still famous and widely used even after AMD Bulldozer was already released for a year. The AMD Bulldozer architecture is actually not that bad since there are some benchmarks which it excelled at, but the Intel Core i series is generally better than the AMD FX line-up. Many PC enthusiasts are hoping that the AMD Zen will truly deliver the superior computing performance as promised, but there are some who has lost their faith in AMD as some signs point towards it not being able to fulfill its lofty claims like Bulldozer.  I’m still putting some hope in the AMD Zen and ready to return to the AMD camp if the AMD Zen can really deliver.