
Jim Keller Resigns from Intel, Effective Immediately - virtualwhys
https://www.anandtech.com/show/15846/jim-keller-resigns-from-intel-effective-immediately
======
cepth
What makes this more bizarre than Keller’s typical short stints at previous
companies is that he has done a ton of media in the last year. He’s probably
given more time to journalists/interviewers in 2020 than in the previous 3
decades of his career combined.

A Fortune piece from May of this year gave some insights into his plans (as
well as provided a nice overview of his career)
([https://fortune.com/longform/microchip-designer-jim-
keller-i...](https://fortune.com/longform/microchip-designer-jim-keller-intel-
fortune-500-apple-tesla-amd/)).

> Keller won’t talk much about the massive chip redesign he’s overseeing—chip
> designers seldom do—and Intel’s new chip probably won’t be ready for another
> year or two. Still, both Intel and Keller have scattered some clues about
> how the chips might work. The new chips will cleanly separate major
> functions, to make it easier for the company to improve one section at a
> time—an approach that evokes the chiplet model Keller used at AMD. Keller
> also hints that Intel’s low-power Atom line of chips may figure more
> prominently in his future designs for PCs and servers.

It doesn’t sound like at press time he was planning to leave.

Keller also did a great interview on Lex Fridman’s podcast, which was released
in February of this year
([https://youtu.be/Nb2tebYAaOA](https://youtu.be/Nb2tebYAaOA)).

Keller then did a presentation at the Matroid conference (held at the end of
February) ([https://youtu.be/8eT1jaHmlx8](https://youtu.be/8eT1jaHmlx8)).

I hope he’s ok, since the Intel statement specifically mentioned “personal
reasons”.

~~~
Traster
His personal reasons may well include that he "personally hates working at
Intel"

~~~
chooseaname
Could be that they brought him in for his expertise and then didn't let him
use that expertise. Bad management has a way of doing that.

~~~
phlakaton
I find it interesting that (as of this point) comments that speculate on
health are downvoted, but comments that speculate on his relationship with
management are not...

~~~
vulcan01
People tend to empathise with that which is more relevant to their own lives;
more people will have a bad relationship with management than bad health.

~~~
phlakaton
Spoken like a young person who will no doubt live forever. ;-)

------
ezoe
How could one person be so important at CPU development?

We have no doubt he is one of the best player in the field from the history.
But doesn't the huge project like CPU development require a lot of good
workers rather than one genius?

~~~
gameswithgo
A lot of people seem to think the key is that he has particular CPU design
genius, but from his interviews I wonder if in fact his genius is in managing
people.

Perhaps people here have worked with him and could offer insight?

~~~
blaser-waffle
Why not both? There are a lot of very talented technical people in the STEM
world, but how many of them are good managers?

And how many of them are _willing_ to do management? I know a lot of sharp
folks who walked away from Mgmt roles because of the BS and headaches.

Someone who is a technical visionary AND can lead teams is rare and powerful.
I'm guessing Keller is _at least_ competent at driving projects, on top of any
technical skillsets he brings.

~~~
gameswithgo
Yes, what I was implying is that some level of design genius is a given, but
what may make him unique is that he also has management skill.

------
headalgorithm
See recent discussion (with Intel's announcement):
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23493046](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23493046)

------
blueblisters
Intel seems to be going through some tough times and I wonder if this will
have long-term effects in the tech industry. The x86 monopoly makes it
difficult to find a viable alternatives quickly, and I think a massive shift
to ARM will likely cause similar problems in the future.

How can we make software more interoperable with hardware? Is moving to open
instruction sets like RISC-V advisable from an economic and innovation point
of view?

~~~
Zigurd
Almost all OSs run on all major architectures. Almost all apps run on managed
language VMs, or in the browser.

Some corporate environments are still captive to architecture, or there would
not still be about 10,000 mainframes in use. X86 compatibility is
transitioning to a similarly invisible need, obscured behind emulation and
virtualization.

~~~
catalogia
> _Almost all apps run on managed language VMs, or in the browser._

I'm curious if there's actually data backing that up. From what I've seen, a
_whole_ lot of application development is still being done with C++.

------
Unklejoe
Totally random, but I would pay a lot of money to attend an "Intro to
microprocessor design" class taught by this guy.

~~~
kens
Is there a good book on modern microprocessor design? Specifically, something
that assumes I know the basics of microprocessors but want to know the
advanced details.

~~~
jasonwatkinspdx
Hennessy and Patterson's Computer Architecture remains the bible.

------
mardifoufs
Is it me or are the comments on the article super weird? I've never seen an
AnandTech comment section like this one. What's going on, why this one?

~~~
esperent
You mean all the people talking about the Illuminati and calling him a
pedophile? Looks like a completely normal comment section to me, nothing
strange there.

~~~
api
Mainstream news comments make me feel like we are on the precipice of the
collapse of civilization.

~~~
chowderhead
I think the people making those comments are the same people you see out in
the world who are visibly unstable. Disheveled, muttering to themselves
angrily, cars plastered in political bumper stickers, getting into
confrontations with service workers, etc.

In the world there is context. You're sitting in a cafe surrounded by 20 other
average people getting on with their day, and there's some guy talking loudly
to no in particular that Bill Gates is trying to steal our blood or whatever.

It's those people sitting on these comment sections all day. That's what I
tell myself anyway, otherwise it's too disturbing to think about the other
explanations.

~~~
chipotle_coyote
I think there's something to this. The internet actually giving context to
people who think Bill Gates is trying to steal our blood or whatever. They can
find a little space on a forum, or a subreddit, or 4chan, or indeed newspaper
comment sections and find _other_ people who think the same way, and now
they're all reinforcing each other.

And, letters to the newspaper have, for many years, been the province of
grumpy retirees and people whose job literally involves writing letters to the
editors (activist organizers, PR people, etc.). I'm always faintly bemused
when I read the comments in the _San Francisco Chronicle,_ which are near-
universally from conservative cranks bemoaning how those big-spendin' liberals
are ruinin' everythin' what with their welfare programs supportin' no-gooders
and their public transit bringin' in crime why in _my_ youth we had to walk up
Telegraph Hill through the snow both ways comin' and goin' and we _liked_ it.
I'm pretty sure I could paste in a letter to the editor that appeared in the
paper of my youth, the _Tampa Tribune_ in the 1980s, with surprisingly little
editing necessary.

~~~
chowderhead
The reinforcement is concerning. Well, I guess that's how we wind up at
censorship and de-platforming issues.

Do you provide space in your cafe to accommodate all the neighborhood nutjobs
to congregate, and they all start shouting in unison about gangstalking or
Bill Gates stealing our blood. How far do you let them go? They rile
themselves up and you get a guy barging into a pizza shop wielding an assault
rifle to take down a non-existent pedophile ring.

There are social and geographic boundaries out in the world, so that doesn't
happen naturally. But on the internet... sigh. It's a problem without an
obvious solution.

~~~
api
I think one argument that can be made on the pro-deplatforming side is that
it's necessary to protect the mentally ill and vulnerable. I've never seen
anything like the Qanon phenomenon, and that's just the beginning. We're going
to see Borg-scale folie a deux.

------
daniel_iversen
Wonder if it's got anything to do with Apple potentially announcing they're
moving computers to their own ARM chips, Microsoft is probably doing the same,
and Google and Amazon and other large players has already started creating
their own CPUs too.. Wonder where this leaves Intel for the future?

------
carlsborg
I will speculate that he will join or do a startup. They money he left on the
table at AMD was enormous - the equity went from 3$ to $50.

~~~
nolok
Sorry but that reeks of "Guy commenting on a discussion board oriented toward
startup thinks someone will focus his career on startup, news at 11!".

There is no reason to think that, and everything in his career points to the
opposite : him joining another Big Corp trying to make a top of the field chip

------
AbuAssar
When I left my previous job I had to sign a 2-year agreement to not work for a
competitor company.

How come he can leave AMD to work for INTEL and do exactly what he did in AMD
i.e design a new cpu tech?

Isn’t that not-permitted in intellectual jobs?

~~~
mipmap04
You had to sign something as you were leaving? What if you just refused to
sign it? What are they going to do? Fire you?

Edit: also, I have refused to sign non-competes in the past and still been
hired. This is something you can negotiate at some companies.

~~~
sbarre
> You had to sign something as you were leaving? What if you just refused to
> sign it? What are they going to do? Fire you?

Seriously. NEVER EVER sign anything on the way out of a job. Don't be a dick
about it, but don't sign.

~~~
flak48
What if one is being laid off and the company offers them a severance package
of X weeks pay for signing some papers?

~~~
krisroadruck
X weeks for a 2 year non-compete? nah. Make it equal to the duration of the
non-compete and then we _might_ be talking.

~~~
HankB99
I wonder if the 6 month "consulting agreement" is 6 months of non-compete.
This statement from the article seems to hint that: "Jim will be serving at
Intel for at least another six months it seems, in the role of a consultant,
so it might be that long before he lands another spot in the industry."

~~~
afwaller
Yes, it’s a common “gardening leave” strategy.

------
s_dev
This will affect Intel share price -- Keller was behind the magic at any CPU
company he worked for.

Things are looking very bad for Intel.

~~~
ant6n
Didn´t he leave AMD several months before Zen launched?

~~~
dijit
Yes, because his work on Zen was done.

It's easy to assume he also helped lay the foundation of Zen2 also; but he
said in a recent interview that he prefers "full architecture refreshes" over
incremental improvements.

------
oasisbob
"Check our this great content before you leave" ... anyone else sick of
websites stuffing an exit interstitial in your browser history, just in case
you try and use the back button to leave?

Obnoxious for Anandtech to start doing this too. Is this a new technique? A
company?

~~~
smhmd
What do you mean? They have a Related Reading section. I searched "Check" on
the page and nothing came.

~~~
oasisbob
When you visit the article posted, the site manages to insert another item in
your browser history, at least on mobile.

When I attempted to leave the article with my browser's back button, instead
of seeing HN, I saw the "Before you leave..." message on top of more article
teasers.

~~~
pembrook
I’m not experiencing that functionality on iOS.

------
tedk-42
Wild guess is he'll end up at Amazon if he went down the ARM route

~~~
camillomiller
Or back at Apple. Or overseeing TSMC’s strategical US expansion...

~~~
afwaller
Apple’s announcing their desktop ARM strategy next week.

Given how many iOS and Mac devices (many Macs have an ARM processor for things
like the touchbar) Apple ships, they’re already one of the larger custom high-
end ARM licensees. It will be interesting to see how it goes for them.

------
DarmokJalad1701
And the silicon ronin is off again!

------
throwaway6497
I always wondered about single individuals having an out-sized impact in tech.
It is usually system/teams which make things happen. I am skeptical when one
person is given most of the credit, and ignore all nameless minions who toil
long hours to do the real work. Curious to hear others' perspectives on this.

~~~
fsloth
Actually in programming single individuals _do_ make the greatest impact.

I'm _good_ at what I do but my work would have far less impact unless it was
done in collaboration with the few people in our org whose contributions are
_astoundingly good_.

You need lots of peoples, sure. But, at the same time, the outocome of a
project actually may depend on the knowhow, skill and diligence of an
individual developer. Their output is prodigious, quality sky high, and in
this manner they function not only as an individual contributor, but also in a
way as a productivity multiplier for everyone they collaborate with, as the
standard they set keeps everyone else also striving high.

You are correct, in a way - non-collaborating individual contributors are kind
of waste and not needed in most cases. But collaborating individual
contributors with high standards and high output? You really, really want to
work with those.

~~~
amznthrowaway5
In many complex domains like ML, I find most people don't contribute anything
and actively make the problem worse. You often don't need the amount of people
that large companies often hire, it's just empire building. Software engineers
aren't replaceable cogs.

------
gigatexal
I’m hoping he joins Apple as an advisor on some really high end ARM chip for
the Mac Pro or something like that

~~~
harpratap
It's better if he goes to Nuvia if you want him to do that.

~~~
gigatexal
Are they working with Apple? I thought Apple is suing them?

~~~
harpratap
No. I was emphasising on the "high end ARM chip" part. Nuvia has plans to
create the highest end ARM chips for data centers and such. Hopefully that
trickles down to laptop size chips too one day. But "high end chips" and
laptops don't go hand in hand anyway. The "regular ARM Chips" are already
powerful enough to power laptop usage.

~~~
gigatexal
If that did happen it’d be the Nuvia ISA based on ARM no? So devices that used
their chips would have their spin of the arm arch —- I read that every ARM
chip is indeed an ARM chip but each vendor puts enough of their own spin on it
that they are different enough — is that the case? If so, it’s unlikely that
Apple will use something from them not built in house and custom to their
needs imo

~~~
als0
The ISA is defined by ARM, vendors can't directly change it. The actual
properties of the chip is up to the vendor e.g. cores, caches, subsystems.

~~~
CalChris
This has changed slightly, recently.

[https://www.eetasia.com/arm-opens-instruction-set-
architectu...](https://www.eetasia.com/arm-opens-instruction-set-
architecture/)

------
fireattack
The article mentioned he joined as VP 2 years ago.

Did he still hold this same position at leave?

------
evtothedev
This is slightly off topic, but is anyone else noticing that when this page
loads, your speakers begin to play background static? After multiple reloads,
I _think_ it correlates with one of the ads loading.

I'm wondering (at the risk of being paranoid) why on earth an ad would have
your laptop broadcast static.

~~~
beckler
I have no intention of loading the page, but I'm curious if it's actually
trying to do ultrasonic communication, possibly with the devices in your
house. Like an Amazon Echo, Google Home, or maybe even your phone. I've always
wondered if ad companies would try to add tracking using ultrasonic
communication because you would probably have a harder time figuring it out.

Granted it's rather far-fetched, but I thought that it could be a possibility.

------
systemBuilder
At Intel it's a fab process company not a computer architecture company they
had huge computer architect Layoffs a few years ago when the marketing army
infested upper management it seems like the fab lazybots have canned Intel's
last best hope...

~~~
ianai
That almost confirms for me that his “personal reasons” are working there is
awful. I’ve worked for marketing led companies before and wouldn’t again.
Yikes.

------
7demons
Resignations without a clear reason may indicate health problems. Probably
cancer, at his age it is most common health issue. Best of luck to him.

------
bob1029
So - Resigned for health reasons effective immediately, but then he's going to
continue being a consultant for 6 months? Must be some fairly particular
health reasons... I genuinely hope he's OK.

IMO, if it was health reasons and he still wanted to continue working for
Intel, Jim would have simply arranged for some alternative working setup -
more remote, email collab, different hours, a few weeks off, etc. None of
these would typically provoke the need for an official resignation & press
release.

~~~
capableweb
"Health reasons" is probably one of the broadest categories of "leaving"
reasons you can give, could be almost anything.

I myself is leaving the company I worked for a while now because of "health
reasons". My coworkers and me are not getting along, so in order to save my
personal sanity, I'm leaving. If the culture would be wrong at Intel for
Keller, they could also publicly say for health reasons rather than blaming
some specific reason and admitting the culture at Intel is bad.

Point is, could be anything really.

~~~
lhoff
This!

Also health reasons have the advantage that it is seen as somewhat rude to ask
for details.

The other unspecific reason that is used similarly is "familiy issues"

While i can understand why someone would use this "excuse" i see it as a
generally bad thing because it fosters that "health" and "familiy" issues are
seen as excuses and not always taken seriously.

The fact that we are discussing that here kind of proofs this point.

~~~
bredren
There are two acceptable reasons that I’ve seen get little inspection:

“Family Reasons” And “Shorter commute” (to some other job)

The commute one I always thought was funny. It seemed to trigger universal
empathy.

