Distinguished microprocessor architect, Keith Diefendorff, joins ARC Cores in research role

Keith Diefendorff, a distinguished scientist who was a key player in developing processor architectures for Motorola, Apple, IBM, Texas Instruments, and NexGen/AMD over the past 25 years, joined ARC Cores last month, becoming vice president of research of ARC International plc. Diefendorff will be responsible for establishing a research and development group at ARC Cores North American headquarters in San Jose. He joins the company from MicroDesign Resources, where he was senior analyst and the editor-in-chief of Microprocessor Report.

Diefendorff began his career in 1975 at Texas Instruments, where he designed systems, processors, and integrated circuits for minicomputers and AI workstations. He has an MSEE from the University of Akron and is a member of the IEEE and the Computer Society. He has over 25 years of industry experience as a microprocessor architect and holds seven U.S. patents. Before joining MDR two years ago, Diefendorff was a distinguished scientist and the director of microprocessor architecture at Apple Computer, where he was the architect of the AltiVec multimedia extensions to the PowerPC. Diefendorff joined Apple in 1996 from NexGen/AMD, where he was director of technical strategy for x86-compatible microprocessors.

Prior to NexGen, Diefendorff was a senior member of the technical staff in Motorola's RISC division in Austin. Diefendorff was on the negotiating team that created the PowerPC partnership with Apple and IBM; he lead the definition of the PowerPC architecture for Motorola, and served as Motorola?s chief PowerPC architect. He originally joined Motorola in 1988 as chief architect of the 88110 RISC microprocessor.

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