I bet you that not a single person here waxing lyrical about the greatness that Jim Keller is even knew the man existed before AMD put out a PR touting that it had hired him back in 2012.
I wonder if these people know the names of the folks who have led various successful projects across the industry? There are a lot of smart people in this industry and a lot of really great chips get made. I guess you need to get hired by AMD in a bid to revive a dying CPU operation before you get any public recognition I suppose...
EDIT: to be clear, I'm not trying to "put down" Keller -- his career history points to somebody who is extremely good at what he does. I'm just trying to say that the people saying "OMG RIP ANYBODY COMPETING WITH KELLER" grossly underestimate the talent pool within the very large and vibrant semiconductor industry.
I've been following Jim Keller's work since his days at DEC, when he was designing the Alpha processors, which I think I said in the first post I made.
You ought to think its telling... that whenever someone needs a powerful microprocessor designed, they all go to the same man...
Apple needed him, so they picked up him years ago. AMD needed him, so they picked him up years ago. Samsung needs him now, so they pick him up... Just wait and watch... in 3-5 years, Samsung is going to have an impressive chip that's a leg-up on other vendors, and probably ties in performance with what Apple releases.
I've never doubted that Zen will be a good chip (I don't think it'll be a great chip, because Keller has to live in reality, which means working within the constraints of AMD's budget). What I've doubted is AMD's ability to stay above water until it can make a widespread release.
As if Samsung designing cores that are slightly faster than the already crazy fast A72 is going to fundamentally change whether people want to buy their phones or not 
Facebook
Twitter