
Jim Keller to Depart Intel - periya
https://newsroom.intel.com/news-releases/changes-intels-technology-systems-architecture-client-group/
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seebetter
Jim’s talk with Lex Friedman was quite amazing. Highly recommend listening-

[https://youtu.be/Nb2tebYAaOA](https://youtu.be/Nb2tebYAaOA)

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imjasonmiller
> 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.

~~~
tumultco
It echoes a Confucius quote I like: “Learning without thinking is useless.
Thinking without learning is dangerous.” (Analects 2:15)

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KKKKkkkk1
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.”_

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

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIG9ztQw2Gc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIG9ztQw2Gc)

And another

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eT1jaHmlx8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eT1jaHmlx8)

And another

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qnl7--
MvNAM](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)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Keller_\(engineer\))

The internal announcement memo:

[https://wccftech.com/exclusive-intel-internal-memo-jim-
kelle...](https://wccftech.com/exclusive-intel-internal-memo-jim-keller-
departure-new-structure/)

~~~
systemvoltage
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.

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Traster
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.

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vicpara
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.

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

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klohto
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.

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ksec
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.

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ReticentVole
Intel's problem is that they fired expensive, older American workers and
replaced them with H1B contractors.

There's a video on AdoredTV about the topic:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agxSclh27uo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agxSclh27uo)

~~~
markus_zhang
But, but it's good for the stock price!

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

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systemvoltage
My guess is he is going back to Apple.

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londons_explore
He's been at Apple before. Doubt he'll go back to a place he's been before
unless he thinks the landscape has changed enough he can have a really big
impact again. I don't think thats the case at Apple.

No - I think he'll go to Nvidia, because he hasn't been there before, hasn't
really worked on GPU's before, and because I think GPU's could gain a lot of
performance by having someone look at optimizing the big picture, adding the
right abstraction layers, and generally making a GPU more CPU-like to allow
more execution to be moved to it more easily.

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culturestate
> Doubt he'll go back to a place he's been before unless he thinks the
> landscape has changed enough he can have a really big impact again

He did two separate stints at AMD, and if the rumors of Apple switching the
Mac to the A-series are true (which they probably are) then there will be some
very interesting problems to solve over the next few years.

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majewsky
If Apple switches Macs to ARM this or next year as rumored, all the
interesting problems w.r.t. chip design must have been solved at this point.

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culturestate
You could make this same argument for any sufficiently mature architecture,
but the reality is that there's always something new around the corner. I
can't imagine the processor in an eventual ARM-based Mac Pro will look much
like the one in the first ARM-based MacBook, you know?

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eatbitseveryday
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.

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jimbob45
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).

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Rebelgecko
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%

~~~
Exmoor
A good person leaving a company drives the company's stock price down. A truly
great person leaving a company drives entire industry's stock down.

(tongue in cheek)

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pranith
Wishing him good luck and healthy life.

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planck01
And...back to AMD?

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

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gigatexal
He could have had a falling out with Intel losing their edge

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nickysielicki
These things are in development for many years before they hit silicon, I
don't think his time at intel has been long enough for that to be true. More
likely, IMO, is that the same bureaucracy that lead to intel falling behind
drives people like Keller away.

If scaling pipelines is hard, scaling pipeline pipelines is harder.

~~~
taurath
Accountant management. Current CEO came up thru finance. Knows how to hold a
dividend steady but not a wafer.

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walrus01
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.

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hn_throwaway_99
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.

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walrus01
If I'm being critical of anyone, it's the person who wrote the press release
and decided on the "effective immediately" and same date, not Keller. They
_have_ to be aware of the optics of it.

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ksec
I am thinking if it was an opportunistic PR. They knew he was resigning for
some time, but didn't want some bad PR from it as Keller was known as the man
to save Intel. Given the market situation today they have decided to rush into
this announcement.

And yes I do agree with your take on it. Intel has some of the best PR and
marketing folks in tech industry. The writing is surely something to be worth
looking into.

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pepoluan
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.

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

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fizixer
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.

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

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scriptdevil
Artificial General Intelligence.

