Jim Keller Turns Up At Tesla

It appears that famed CPU architect Jim Keller is now employed over at Tesla Motors as Vice President of Autopilot Hardware Engineering. Tesla has confirmed the hire to Electrek in the statement below.

Jim Keller is joining Tesla as Vice President of Autopilot Hardware Engineering. Jim will bring together the best internal and external hardware technologies to develop the safest, most advanced autopilot systems in the world.

Mr. Keller has worked for AMD and Apple in recent years and played a leading roll in Apple’s A4 and A5 SoCs along with the AMD K7, K8 and Zen processor architectures. Tesla is currently using NVIDIA Tegra (ARM based) SoCs for their cars, but it appears that they might be looking to design some of their own silicon based on this hire. The Tesla Model S has a 17-inch LCD touchscreen center console. This is the largest panel ever used inside a car and handles navigation, streaming media and ride settings, so they need powerful hardware to run it. There is also a 12.3″ LCD display for the driver

Legit Reviews was saddened to hear that Keller left AMD after wrapping up his work on Zen, but we are excited to see how AMD’s upcoming Zen processors perform as well as what he is going to be doing for Tesla!