One of the key people behind Intel's chip manufacturing is leaving the company. Jim Keller, senior vice president of the Technology Systems Architecture Client Group (TSCG) and general manager of the Silicon Engineering Group (SEG), joined the company in 2018 to lead its design efforts, but his tenure at Intel was short and he is leaving with immediate effect The company is now in the process of.

The reason for Keller's departure is unclear, with only a press release posted in Intel's newsroom stating that it was for "personal reasons." Keller will remain at Intel for six months as a consultant to ease the transition to his successor.

As such, Dr. Mercy Rendutintala, president of TSCG, will be looking for a replacement for Mr. Keller's extensive duties, which span many product divisions.

Sundari Mitra, who led the Configurable Intellectual Property and Chassis Group, will lead the newly created IP Engineering Group, and Gene Scutelli will lead the Xeon and Networking Engineering Group. Of greatest interest to us gamers is that Darman Hejmadi will return to head the Client Engineering Group, where he will be responsible for designing system-on-chip (SoC) and next-generation CPUs, chipsets, and devices.

Navid Shahriari will continue to lead the Manufacturing and Product Engineering Group, bringing together a team of senior executives charged with keeping AMD off its tail and delivering products that can keep ARM out of the customer server rack.

Keller has a long and successful history in chip manufacturing. He was part of the AMD effort that disrupted Intel with the K7 Athlon processor and then led the K8 project; AMD's most successful project was the Zen microarchitecture, that project that is still causing headaches for Intel for the Zen 3 and Ryzen 4000 chips. It is that project that is still causing Intel headaches.

Keller also worked on self-driving technology at Tesla before moving to Intel, where he worked under Intel's chief architect Raja Koduri (among other titles), focusing primarily on Intel's latest discrete GPU, the Intel Xe.

Keller will remain in the consultant position for six months, and it will be interesting to see what, if any, changes there will be in Intel's next-generation architecture and roadmap.