It turns out that Hexus got the word that Jim Keller, the chief engineer that was overseeing the development of some important projects including Zen X86 will be leaving AMD. This is definitely not the greatest news for AMD, which already lost a few capable leaders.

Mr Keller is the lead processor designer behind highly successful K7 and when he worked for Apple he worked on A4 and A5 chips for the company. He went back to AMD in 2012 and worked with the leading team of engineers.

 AMD spokesperson stated: 

"Jim was responsible for overseeing the teams defining the roadmaps for AMD’s CPU cores, systems IP and server and client SoCs. Jim’s departure is not expected to impact our public product or technology roadmaps, and we remain on track for “Zen” sampling in 2016 with first full year of revenue in 2017."

AMD's Chief Technology Officer Mark Papermaster will step in as acting leader for Keller's team as Zen is probably the most anticipated product in the history of AMD. The main issue is that it turns out that K12 ARM next generation core is delayed to 2017 and it looks like AMD will start making money with Zen in 2017 and this is really far away from where we are today.

Let’s hope that AMD can close this financing deal with the Silver Lake, at least to be able to finance the development of Zen but it has been a while since AMD has been in such a trouble as it is today. Microsoft buyout starting to look much better now.