If you’re even remotely eager about pc {hardware} and PCs basically, you will have possible heard about AMD’s Ryzen processors. That’s as a result of after being almost non-existent within the CPU market for half a decade within the early 2010s, AMD got here again swinging with its highly effective but inexpensive Ryzen CPUs. And on the coronary heart of those Ryzen chips, powering them, is the Zen micro-architecture.
While Michael T Clark, a Corporate Fellow Design Engineer at AMD was the chief architect of Zen, overseeing your entire challenge was none aside from legendary chip guru Jim Keller, who is hailed as genius by the vast majority of the tech group.
Earlier this yr, when sharing a bit about his time at AMD throughout a convention referred to as “Future of Compute” held by the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Keller remarked that AMD “stupidly cancelled” the K12 ARM challenge.
If you may’t recall what K12 was, mainly it was sister challenge alongside Zen that Keller was tasked to run. And whereas Zen was primarily based on x86, K12 was being constructed utilizing the Arm structure. At the time, AMD and Keller have been engaged on a extremely fascinating challenge dubbed “Skybridge” which married Arm and x86 on the identical socket as they have been being designed with pin compatibility.
And despite the fact that AMD did launch an Arm server chip within the type of the Opteron A1100 SoC, its customized K12 core by no means noticed the sunshine of the day.
At the convention, Keller additionally revealed that whereas at AMD, he labored on Zen 2 and Zen 3 as effectively. This signifies that the upcoming Zen 4 structure goes to be the primary AMD design which was not influenced by the veteran chip designer. After working at AMD, Keller jumped ship to rivals Intel the place he allegedly labored on a Zen 5 killer challenge purportedly referred to as “Royal Core”.
Source: CSAChannel IISC (YouTube) by way of Wccftech
https://www.neowin.net/news/legendary-chip-guru-jim-keller-who-helped-design-zen-calls-amd-stupid-for-axing-arm-k12/
