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If you are even remotely interested in computer hardware and PCs in general, you have likely heard about AMD's Ryzen processors. That's because after being nearly non-existent in the CPU market for half a decade in the early 2010s, AMD came back swinging with its powerful yet affordable Ryzen CPUs. And at the heart of these 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 the entire project was none other than legendary chip guru Jim Keller, who is hailed as genius by the majority of the tech community.
Earlier this year, when sharing a bit about his time at AMD during a conference called "Future of Compute" held by the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Keller remarked that AMD "stupidly cancelled" the K12 ARM project.
If you can't recall what K12 was, basically it was sister project alongside Zen that Keller was tasked to run. And while Zen was based on x86, K12 was being built using the Arm architecture. At the time, AMD and Keller were working on a really interesting project dubbed "Skybridge" which married Arm and x86 on the same socket as they were being designed with pin compatibility.
And even though AMD did launch an Arm server chip in the form of the Opteron A1100 SoC, its custom K12 core never saw the light of the day.
At the conference, Keller also revealed that while at AMD, he worked on Zen 2 and Zen 3 as well. This means that the upcoming Zen 4 architecture is going to be the first AMD design which was not influenced by the veteran chip designer. After working at AMD, Keller jumped ship to rivals Intel where he allegedly worked on a Zen 5 killer project purportedly called "Royal Core".
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