
The Man Behind AMD's Zen Microarchitecture: Jim Keller - geezerjay
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Keller_(engineer)
======
powercf
Zen is the work of a huge team of talented engineers. To single one out as
"the man behind Zen" seems very wrong. I don't know what Jim Keller's
contribution to Zen was (and without a blog or autobiography or similar from
someone well placed inside the team, then neither do most commentators), but
if he did work on the Zen architecture, it's hard to believe that he would
have accomplished much without the help of a good team. Keller is the main AMD
engineer singled out for praise on The Internet, while the hard work (and
given that Zen is such a success, it's surely the result of a mountain of hard
work) of everyone else is mostly ignored.

~~~
VT_Drew
And Apple was more than Jobs and Woz, but they get all the credit.

~~~
chaostheory
It's true. [https://www.theymadethat.com/things/iwe/apple-
macintosh-128k](https://www.theymadethat.com/things/iwe/apple-macintosh-128k)

It's just so hard to track any history related to people who are not super
famous.

~~~
netsharc
Reading Woz's book, it seemed like he knew what every gate on every chip on
the first Apple computer... if not gate, at least every chip.

~~~
chaostheory
The strange thing about Woz is that I don't know what he worked on at Apple
after the Apple II

[https://www.theymadethat.com/people/31em5b/steve-
wozniak](https://www.theymadethat.com/people/31em5b/steve-wozniak)

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kirse
Arguably his A64/x86-64 work has been more impactful (so far). Imagine a young
Jim Keller from Penn State University, makes you wonder how many SV firms
today would toss out that resume in favor of a less... generic... institution.
Even worse, he works for DEC, which is a boring big company. This guy is like
vomit in the mouth of startup culture.

~~~
pkaye
That is because the average startup culture thinks everything other than
web/mobile is not interesting. All the system architecture guides I see these
days consist of load balancers, webservers and databases as if that is all
that matters.

~~~
tmccrmck
You can see it in the Rust community. So much of the focus has been on http
servers instead of codecs, operating systems, daemons, file systems, etc.

~~~
vvanders
That seems pretty uncharitable, there's more than a few OS projects happening
in the Rust space and I know a bunch of people spend time poking at low-level
stuff(myself included).

~~~
cbHXBY1D
The above poster didn't say that there weren't any OSs or low-level stuff
(anyone who frequents HN would know that) they said that majority focus is
elsewhere.

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geezerjay
I've submitted this thread after stumbling on this HN thread on High End CPUs

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14986105](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14986105)

Among the comments, a user pointed out Jim Keller's contributions to the CPU
industry. Trully fascinating read.

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tbrock
Too bad he went to work at Tesla. It's nice to see that people are interested
in the self driving car thing but, as in the case of Chris Latner, isn't it
more fun / more leverage to work on the stuff that enables all this?

~~~
VT_Drew
He basically building off his work at AMD, there was an announcement about a
month ago that Telsa will use Zen chips for their self driving cars, surprise
surprise. Who would have thought the guy that was lead the effort to design
Zen has opted to use those chips in his new project at a another company.

~~~
hajile
Even if he hadn't helped in their design, it's a great chip for the massively
parallel computing needed for smart cars.

The fact that (vs Intel) using it knocks $500+ off the price of the car
(that's a couple percent of the model 3 selling price) and uses less power
under typical loads makes it an even better proposition.

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examancer
Dr. Lisa Zu, CEO of AMD, is the real "man" behind the Zen microarchitecture.
Not only is she an engineer who was deeply involved with the product, she lead
the company through a tremendous turn-around that made Zen possible and put
into place all the platform and support pieces the resulting Ryzen/Epyc
products would need.

I find it interesting that when Apple brought out the iPad neither Keller nor
Ive got credit, Steve Jobs did. I don't even know the project leads or primary
engineers behind Windows 95, Bill Gates got most of the credit. Couldn't name
for you the other geniuses behind SpaceX or Tesla, I just hear about Elon
Musk. Does the dark lord get credit for Oracle's awful products? No, Larry
Ellison is the name we hear. Good or bad, the CEO usually gets the credit...
except in this case.

I wonder if it has something to do with Dr. Zu being a woman.

That said, obviously Jim Keller is a skilled chip designer. It would be nice
to see more of the supporting cast and geniuses behind innovations get some
spotlight instead of all credit flowing to the top (unless maybe it's a
woman).

~~~
edenblitz
There were articles a while back mentioning AMD's success with Jim Keller in
the past and hopes that his return would bring that kind of success again:
[https://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news/2344223/amd-to-
design-n...](https://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news/2344223/amd-to-design-new-
micro-architecture-for-2015-launch-under-chip-guru-jim-keller)

I think assuming that the reason he's getting credit is specifically to slight
a woman being CEO is baseless.

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agumonkey
K7, K8 (x86_64), A4, Zen... Only that.

~~~
dijit
>Only

Those are impressive feats, K7 and K8 made AMD truly relevant in the early-mid
2000's. Zen seems to be emerging as a strong contender to the current and
potentially next generation of Intel CPUs with a lot more left to optimise and
refine in the architecture.

~~~
santoshalper
I think he was being facetious. That is a remarkable list of accomplishments.

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agumonkey
I said that because in the other thread K7 wasn't mentioned. K7 being the
glory days of AMD at the forefront of the market (instead of being the
slightly faster and cheaper intel compatible).

Basically Keller was involved, if not more, pushing the market enveloppe 4
times in 20 years.

I want this man to work with Chuck Moore.

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Hikikomori
Afaik Michael Clark was the chief architect for Zen, Keller was above him
though.

~~~
compton_effect
Yup. I think what Keller's main talents are in putting together and leading a
great team.

~~~
greglindahl
... and is this a guess? Have you met him, worked with him?

