Jim Keller

James B. Keller is an American microprocessor engineer best known for his work at AMD, Apple, and Tesla. He was the lead architect of the AMD K8 microarchitecture (including the original Athlon 64) and was involved in designing the Athlon (K7) He was coauthor of the specifications for the x86-64 instruction set and HyperTransport interconnect. From 2012 to 2015 he returned to AMD to work on the AMD K12 and Zen microarchitectures. He is currently the CEO of Tenstorrent, a position he assumed in January 2023. He previously held the position of CTO in the same company since 2020.

Early life, family and education Jim Keller was born in New Jersey as the second of six children. His father worked at General Electric Aerospace as a mechanical engineer, and his mother was a stay-at-home mother during his childhood then became a therapist later in life.

Career Jim Keller joined DEC in 1982 and worked there until 1998, where he was involved in designing a number of processors, including the VAX 8800, the Alpha 21164 and the Alpha 21264 processors. which also included designing the x86-64 instruction set and HyperTransport interconnect, mainly used for multiprocessor communications. In November 2000 SiByte was acquired by Broadcom, where he continued as chief architect

In January 2016, Keller joined Tesla, Inc. as Vice President of Autopilot Hardware Engineering.

In April 2018, Keller joined Intel, where he served as Senior Vice President. He resigned from Intel in June 2020, officially citing personal reasons, though a later report said his departure was catalyzed by a dispute about whether the company should outsource more of its production.

Keller joined AI chip startup Tenstorrent as CTO in December 2020 and became its CEO in January 2023.

In 2023, Keller and Sam Zeloof founded Atomic Semi, a foundry tools company that aims to design and manufacture low-cost small scale fabrication equipment.

Personal life Jim Keller's wife Bonnie is the sister of Canadian author and clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson.