Jim Keller Reportedly Joins Intel After AMD, Tesla Stint

[arakan94]

Michael, the Keller leading Zen team is false information - he was at AMD to lead development of their ARM CPU (which was later cancelled) and development of Zen was left completely to Suzanne Plummer (by his own words, he did not interfere in any way with the Zen team).

[Vistaus]

Michael, the Keller leading Zen team is false information - he was at AMD to lead development of their ARM CPU (which was later cancelled) and development of Zen was left completely to Suzanne Plummer (by his own words, he did not interfere in any way with the Zen team).

He did work on Zen: https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1330348

"By that time, AMD had already started work on its comeback core Zen under Jim Keller, a microprocessor rock star who led AMD’s K8, then left to work on two successful chip startups and do a stint designing smartphone chips at Apple.

Keller “was involved in the early days of Zen, we worked together on the arch and he made me lead architect for it because he was running the whole [processor design] group,” said Clark. “The engineering team loved him because he’s an engineer at heart and you felt you had a champion,” he said.

Keller left to join Tesla in 2015, but by then the design was well along and had the deep corporate backing it needed."

[trek]

Still, now that he's moved on from Tesla I'm starting to wonder what he did in those two years and a couple of months. Did he lead design on some next generation hardware with support for proper LiDAR (like Google's self-driving efforts) or did he just get frustrated with how Tesla seems to prefer using other companies' hardware for Autopilot* and just quit?

it seems that Keller was working on a custom chip to be developed by AMD for Tesla

https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/09/21/why-tesla-inc-hired-jim-keller-last-year.aspx

[edwaleni]

It seems a bit suspicious to me how so many of AMD's employees (not just Koduri or Keller) end up at Intel, despite the fact that Intel's products never seem to change due to their presence. Gets me to think that Intel doesn't really want them as engineers, they just want these people contractually obligated to stop supporting AMD. Intel knows they can't really do anything directly to AMD without igniting a lawsuit, but there's nothing illegal about offering better pay to AMD's employees. As long as AMD doesn't have good engineers, they can't threaten Intel. Intel is overdue for a new architecture, but it wouldn't surprise me if they know that silicon transistors are pretty much at their limit. Intel might not have a worthy replacement, so they just need to slow down AMD's progress until they can figure out what to do.

Kind of like what AT&T and Verizon do with wireless spectrum. They buy it all up at auction and then sit on it for several years to keep it out of competitors hands.

It's cheaper to buy off what your competition needs than to actually spend the money to compete.

[Michael]

http://app.plan.intel.com/e/er?cid=e...8&elqat=1Intel has now announced he will be leading Silicon Engineering:

[Marc Driftmeyer]

I feel bad for AMD.
This guy seems to bring results with him.

He sure didn't bring results at Samsung whose efforts to topple Apple's A series is getting left further and further behind. Apple's upcoming A12 is going to be even a bigger blow to Samsung's flagship lines, and will be across all of Apple's iOS devices, sans the next AppleTV and HomePod.

Jim's stint at Tesla was as productive as Lattner's: not at all.

People seem to ignore that AMD is in the process of designing the Zen 5 architecture, thus Jim wasn't there for the Zen 2 and Zen 3, etc. Lisa Su is the MVP at AMD and the teams she's has been able to assemble with Papermaster: both IBM alum with Papermaster gleening experience at Apple.

[nomadewolf]

He sure didn't bring results at Samsung whose efforts to topple Apple's A series is getting left further and further behind. Apple's upcoming A12 is going to be even a bigger blow to Samsung's flagship lines, and will be across all of Apple's iOS devices, sans the next AppleTV and HomePod.

Jim's stint at Tesla was as productive as Lattner's: not at all.

People seem to ignore that AMD is in the process of designing the Zen 5 architecture, thus Jim wasn't there for the Zen 2 and Zen 3, etc. Lisa Su is the MVP at AMD and the teams she's has been able to assemble with Papermaster: both IBM alum with Papermaster gleening experience at Apple.

Well, you got me there.
Although, ir we are to take Apple's word, they're basically over taxing their batteries while they're new in order to get extra performance.
But later on, users have to subject to much slower devices and even be forced to upgrade to a new one...
So, i guess it's easy to be first when you use those kind of tactics...

[tg--]

I don't think people should read too much into this.
Jim Keller has, for a long time, been more of a free lance microchip architect. He's hired to bring up or improve a microarchitecture, and when that's progressed sufficiently, moves on. Apparently he's quite good at that.
That's what he'll do at Intel as well.

marc Driftmeyer: You've been duped. Keller never worked for Samsung, that was a rumour spread by WCCF Tech, who are pretty much always wrong. Samsung likes to do things in-house, they tend not to hire people like Keller, but invest in bringing up their own stuff - for better or worse.
Nobody's (well almost nobody ) saying that Keller single-handedly saved AMD; they too have a lot of good engineers and architects in-house - but I suspect that they valued Kellers insights a great deal to bring up Zen. Keller being gone doesn't mean they can't carry on improving it by a lot.
That said, I'd agree that Lisa Su is the right person in charge at the right time and she deserves the praise.

For some reason people love making some people into miracle workers. That's not how the world works.
I'm sure even Tesla knew that they were hiring him for, he's clearly not the typical management guy, but a specialist tasked for very specific goals. And since he's not a miracle worker it's also possible that some things didn't work out as planned and neither of both parties saw a reason to go further - it might also have worked out quite well, Tesla might just be very quiet about what they've developed.

[microcode]

...Intel knows they can't really do anything directly to AMD without igniting a lawsuit, but there's nothing illegal about offering better pay to AMD's employees...

There are these things called creativity and experience, engineers and technical managers are often hired for these properties. Shocking!

[audir8]

Taking back some CUDA market share from Nvidia (with Xeon Phi etc..) seems like a worthy goal for Jim Keller and Raja Koduri. Failing that, there's always bringing x86 to mobile...