If you’re into computer hardware and PCs in general, you’ve probably heard of AMD’s Ryzen processors. Nearly absent from the CPU market for five years in the early 2010s, AMD has made a big comeback with its powerful yet affordable Ryzen CPUs. At the heart of these Ryzen chips is the Zen microarchitecture that powers them.
While Michael T. Clark, Enterprise Design Engineer at AMD, was the chief architect of Zen, the person who oversaw the entire project was legendary chip guru Jim Keller, considered a genius by most of the tech community.
Speaking about his time at AMD earlier this year during a conference called “Future of Compute” organized by the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Keller considered it “stupid” for AMD to cancel the K12 ARM project.
K12 can basically be described as a sister project to Zen that Keller was tasked with running. Zen was based on x86, while K12 was built using the Arm architecture. At the time, AMD and Keller were working on a really interesting project called “Skybridge”, which was designed with pin compatibility and combined Arm and x86 on the same socket.
Although AMD has released an Arm server chip in the form of the Opteron A1100 SoC, the custom K12 core never came to light.
During that conference, Keller revealed that while he was at AMD, he was also working on Zen 2 and Zen 3. This means that the upcoming Zen 4 architecture will be the first AMD design without the direct influence of the veteran chip designer. After working at AMD, Keller moved on to rival Intel, who allegedly worked on a Zen 5 killer project dubbed “Royal Core.”
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