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Jim Keller to Depart Intel

192 points| periya | 5 years ago |newsroom.intel.com

107 comments

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seebetter|5 years ago

Jim’s talk with Lex Friedman was quite amazing. Highly recommend listening-

https://youtu.be/Nb2tebYAaOA

imjasonmiller|5 years ago

> If you constantly unpacked everything for deeper understanding, you're never going to get anything done. If you don't unpack understanding when you need to, you'll do the wrong thing.

I really liked that quote. It's a great talk indeed.

nickysielicki|5 years ago

I wish that the interviewer had more background in computer architecture. A lot of these questions wouldn't be asked if he took an architecture class in school.

Keller says a lot of interesting things in this interview that aren't followed up on. He calls for more substantial changes and architectural changes, I wonder what he thinks of spatial architectures.

gyre007|5 years ago

I love all of Lex's podcasts. They've been truly mind-expanding for me personally.

castratikron|5 years ago

Amazing how he didn't know how to read until age 8, and then read two books a week up to now (about 50 years)

ciarannolan|5 years ago

I just watched this entire thing. I'd never heard of Lex before.

It's pretty funny for the interviewer to say "agree to disagree" or "well, no" when he's clearly not the expert of the two.

gigatexal|5 years ago

amazing podcast episode for sure, I wonder where Keller will go next. It'd be insane if he went to AMD or Apple in their new ARM push.

KKKKkkkk1|5 years ago

Bloomberg has the following commentary:

“Keller’s departure is a big deal and suggests that whatever he was implementing at Intel was not working or the old Intel guard did not want to implement it,” Hans Mosesmann, an analyst at Rosenblatt Securities, wrote in a note to investors. “The net of this situation for us is that Intel’s processor and process node roadmaps are going to be more in flux or broken than even we had expected.”

Traster|5 years ago

Intel has some absolutely killer politics, especially at the higher level, entire organisations will plan road maps deliberately contingent on deliverables they know other teams are going to miss. I wouldn't be surprised if this was the result of Keller just having enough of it and giving up. The fact that the press release involves an already resolved organisational structure that looks highly political is a big red flag.

CalChris|5 years ago

Jim Keller giving a talk on Moore's Law at Berkeley,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIG9ztQw2Gc

And another

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eT1jaHmlx8

And another

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qnl7--MvNAM

DEC, PA Semi, Apple, AMD, Tesla, Intel. He's been everywhere.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Keller_(engineer)

The internal announcement memo:

https://wccftech.com/exclusive-intel-internal-memo-jim-kelle...

systemvoltage|5 years ago

I like it when they’re introducing him and during the introduction he was praised for “Zen Architecture”; you can see Jim in the background shaking his head - sign of humility that he is not alone, amazing engineering team that made that happen under his leadership. This kind of humility is rare.

vicpara|5 years ago

It's so funny to hear the interviewer explaining to Jim what he understands. All this happening after in the first part of the interview he couldn't compute the answer Jim gave when explaining predicting branches. Also he's in no position to push back on ideas. As if I really care what the interviewer care or not.

It's such a pity the interviewer didn't prepare more technical questions that touch on the new architectures, compilers, cache, TPUs and his design experience. I only care about him asking good questions.

Jim equally seems incredibly engaged and patient with the questions sometime moving the game to a lot higher level than at which the question was posed. Without breaking a sweat.

gameswithgo|5 years ago

interviewer is a domain expert in AI, which maybe explain what he pushed back and what he didn’t delve deeper into

klohto|5 years ago

If Jim is going back to Apple or AMD then the Intel struggle won’t stop anytime soon. As much as I like Apple, I hope his choice will be AMD.

ksec|5 years ago

Every time I criticise Intel, Or more like pointing out facts , supporters will always use Jim Keller as the excuse, as if he was the silver bullet.

Intel's struggle has nothing to do with is processors' design. Sunny Cove and Willow Cove ( aka Icelake and TigerLake ) were close to design complete before Jim Keller joined. Intel's problem is with their manufacturing, both technical and economical. And Jim Keller is not a Fab guy, nothing he could do to fix this.

kasabali|5 years ago

There was a joke in the reddit thread but I seriously think it'd be fantastic had he gone to work for VIA to kickstart competitive processors. Even with a strong AMD, we would still benefit from more competition in x86.

spamizbad|5 years ago

I'm guessing a project he was working on either wrapped up or got canned. He had previously helped AMD with their Zen architecture.

systemvoltage|5 years ago

My guess is he is going back to Apple.

eatbitseveryday|5 years ago

My guesses to this are either 1) leaving due to not a good culture fit or 2) literally a personal reason (e.g., health).

Intel has a culture which isn't exactly amenable to working flexibly, or to someone coming in and making lots of changes to the culture itself.

jimbob45|5 years ago

That’s a huge surprise. For reference, Intel’s stock is down 6.5% today (on what is admittedly a historically bad day for the market to begin with).

Rebelgecko|5 years ago

I don't know that those are necessarily correlated. The S&P500 is also down by 6%. NVidia is down by 6%. AMD is actually down by 8%

walrus01|5 years ago

Resigned effective immediately, announced the same day due to "personal reasons" is not a good look. Anyone who's spent a sufficient amount of time reading $BIGCORP press releases immediately sees how it stands out from the usual PR fluff.

In situations where I have seen that in the past, the person was caught in grievously bad, unambiguous case of sexual harassment, racism or something equally socially despised.

If this is not the case, Intel's PR people are doing a serious disservice to Keller in the way the announcement has been structured.

Generally if a higher level executive resigns due to actual "personal reasons" or a family tragedy, and it's an amicable departure, it's announced with at least a few weeks notice.

hn_throwaway_99|5 years ago

Your throwing of shade is unwarranted:

> Intel is pleased to announce, however, that Mr. Keller has agreed to serve as a consultant for six months to assist with the transition.

skummetmaelk|5 years ago

Or they find out they have an aggressive terminal illness.

pranith|5 years ago

Wishing him good luck and healthy life.

planck01|5 years ago

And...back to AMD?

jaas|5 years ago

It says "for personal reasons," which is not text I would expect if he was just going to another company.

pepoluan|5 years ago

Wow. This likely throws a wrench in Intel's ability to design a revolutionary "Non Core" architecture free of all the security vulnerabilities that have been plaguing the Core family due to unsafe shortcuts in the name of performance.

Here's to hoping that in the 2 years Keller had been in Intel, he had left many good, realizable ideas on how to overhaul Intel's CPU architecture. If not, then this news might be the death knell for Intel's CPU might for the next decade.

BearOso|5 years ago

Given the lifetime of CPU design, if Intel releases a revolutionary new architecture in two years, we’ll know where it came from.

fizixer|5 years ago

Best guess: Jim Keller came in with guns blazing about how Moore's law is not dead and if you believe so you're stupid.

He was a comp-architecture guy counting on the device/physics folks to deliver. They didn't, while Jim put his reputation on the line. He probably resigned in disappointment and/or protest.

- Moore's law is dead at the physics level.

- Exponential tech progress doesn't stop but it won't be in the form of Si FETs, at least not in the foreseeable future.

- There is plenty of opportunity at the higher layers of abstraction though.

- Fortunately the AGI problem has escaped Moore's law (AGI can happen with existing node technology). And in my opinion that's all that matters for the next 10 years.

qeternity|5 years ago

If AGI is solved, it most certainly won’t be in the next decade and will not be economical on current node tech.

aceperry|5 years ago

What is the AGI problem? I've never heard of it.

ccmcarey|5 years ago

Got a source for that AGI claim?