From Electrek:
We’ve learned that Tesla this month quietly hired high-profile microprocessor engineer Jim Keller as Vice President of Autopilot Hardware Engineering. Tesla today confirmed the news and sent us the following statement:
Jim Keller is joining Tesla as Vice President of Autopilot Hardware Engineering. Jim will bring together the best internal and external hardware technologies to develop the safest, most advanced autopilot systems in the world.
Before his stint at AMD with former Apple colleague Mark Papermaster, Keller was a director in the platform architecture group at Apple focusing on mobile products. There, he architected several generations of mobile processors, including the chip families found in millions of Apple iPads, iPhones, iPods and Apple TVs. Prior to Apple, Keller was vice president of design for P.A. Semi, a fabless semiconductor design firm specializing in low-power mobile processors that was acquired by Apple in 2008.
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As far as I am aware, Keller specialises in designing computer chips and their architecture. It was obvious that Apple enjoys the sales volume to make it advantageous to design custom chips, but I’m at a loss to see how Tesla could justify the level of investment needed for custom silicon. The only explanation that might make sense would be if Tesla were planning on selling autopilot modules to other manufacturers, otherwise sales of less than 20,000 per quarter doesn’t seem enough to support the investment.
I think you’re right, he’s probably putting autopilot on a chip which would be an interesting challenge for someone like him and as you say, might be licensable by Tesla to the others working on driverless cars.