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The Man Behind AMD's Zen Microarchitecture: Jim Keller

99 points by geezerjay 9y ago

geezerjay 9y ago
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.
kirse 9y ago
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.
- deepnotderp 9y ago
  To be fair, the DEC Alpha team was highly respected in the CPU architecture industry.
- pkaye 9y ago
  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.
  - Nokinside 9y ago
    Startup culture you describe is more entrepreneurship than high-tech. Business idea and execution makes the difference, not several years of technological edge over competition. Biotech, medicine, electronics, wireless technology, signal processing, chemistry and material science startups work in different environment. Get good education (PhD is requirement in many areas), work in a firm or research group until you are at top of the game and have learned all practical skills, then start a business.
  - tmccrmck 9y ago
    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 9y ago
      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 9y ago
        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.
    - gsnedders 9y ago
      To be fair, in a sense it's less surprising when the most notable project in Rust, from relatively early on, was a web browser.
    - kjs3 9y ago
      There needs to be some variant of 'Goodwins Law' where in any HN thread, the probability of someone inserting Rust in the conversation, no matter how irrelevant, approaches 1.
- davemp 9y ago
  It's a shame how going through the hassle and politics of getting PhD (from a reputable school) is now almost a requirement for the cutting edge. Getting a PhD is honestly such a bad deal financially and socially. I'm sure the prospect of sinking ~5yrs into some laser focused sub-field for garbage pay scares away a lot of potential--not including academia's useless bureaucracy cough GRE.
  - geezerjay 9y ago
    > It's a shame how going through the hassle and politics of getting PhD (from a reputable school) is now almost a requirement for the cutting edge. Nowadays, a PhD is literally dedicated to carry out original research, which normally entails a curricular part that serves to help a candidate get up to date on the state of the art. Conducting original research is a natural requirement to be on the cutting edge of any scientific or technical field.
    - davemp 9y ago
      > a PhD is literally dedicated to carry out original research *for ~$30k/yr for five years > Conducting original research is a natural requirement to be on the cutting edge of any scientific or technical field. I'm not saying that a PhD won't prepare you. Just that it's inefficient in terms of stress/time/money.
      - geezerjay 9y ago
        > *for ~$30k/yr for five years Perhaps that's a US thing. In most european countries (if not all), not only are the costs significantly lower but each state sets up research programs where PhD candidates are actually paid to pursue their studies. Those PhD positions are limited and in some places the pay tends to be somewhat low, but still PhD candidates do get paid for their work. There are also programs where private companies can participate in PhD programs as part of their R&D investment, and enable their employees to pursuit PhDs while working for them.
        9y ago
tbrock 9y ago
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?
- jrs95 9y ago
  There's a lot of challenging & low level work to be done in the stuff Tesla is working on, and a lot of it will essentially be key in reinventing the auto industry. So I don't think it's necessarily fair to dismiss what he might be doing now as beneath what he's done in the past.
- VT_Drew 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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.
  - chedda7 9y ago
    Do you have source on Tesla using AMD chips?
  - tbrock 9y ago
    Better not drive fast on the same roads over and over, the car might crash!
agumonkey 9y ago
K7, K8 (x86_64), A4, Zen... Only that.
- dijit 9y ago
  >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 9y ago
    I think he was being facetious. That is a remarkable list of accomplishments.
    - agumonkey 9y ago
      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.
- aidenn0 9y ago
  You forgot Pwrficient, and he worked on some of the DEC Alpha processors as well.
Hikikomori 9y ago
Afaik Michael Clark was the chief architect for Zen, Keller was above him though.
- compton_effect 9y ago
  Yup. I think what Keller's main talents are in putting together and leading a great team.
  - greglindahl 9y ago
    ... and is this a guess? Have you met him, worked with him?
powercf 9y ago
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.
- sremani 9y ago
  In our 5000 years of recorded History, the Leader gets the glory and/or the sword. Now a days, they do get Golden parachutes but attributing success to Leaders (and in many cases rightfully so) has not changed.
- santoshalper 9y ago
  No doubt, but on the other hand, look at his resume. Every project he has led has been a huge success, and when he left AMD for a time, they floundered. Lots of people work hard and contribute, but the value of a top leader is undeniable.
- VT_Drew 9y ago
  And Apple was more than Jobs and Woz, but they get all the credit.
  - chaostheory 9y ago
    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 9y ago
      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.
examancer 9y ago
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).
- KSS42 9y ago
  I completely agree, she deserves more credit. BTW, I have always seen her name written as Lisa Su. Why do you write Zu?
- edenblitz 9y ago
  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-new-micro-architecture-for-2015-launch-under-chip-guru-jim-keller https://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news/2344223/amd-to-design-n... I think assuming that the reason he's getting credit is specifically to slight a woman being CEO is baseless.

99 points by geezerjay 9y ago

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.

kirse 9y ago

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.

deepnotderp 9y ago
To be fair, the DEC Alpha team was highly respected in the CPU architecture industry.
pkaye 9y ago
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.
- Nokinside 9y ago
  Startup culture you describe is more entrepreneurship than high-tech. Business idea and execution makes the difference, not several years of technological edge over competition. Biotech, medicine, electronics, wireless technology, signal processing, chemistry and material science startups work in different environment. Get good education (PhD is requirement in many areas), work in a firm or research group until you are at top of the game and have learned all practical skills, then start a business.
- tmccrmck 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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 9y ago
      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.
  - gsnedders 9y ago
    To be fair, in a sense it's less surprising when the most notable project in Rust, from relatively early on, was a web browser.
  - kjs3 9y ago
    There needs to be some variant of 'Goodwins Law' where in any HN thread, the probability of someone inserting Rust in the conversation, no matter how irrelevant, approaches 1.
davemp 9y ago
It's a shame how going through the hassle and politics of getting PhD (from a reputable school) is now almost a requirement for the cutting edge. Getting a PhD is honestly such a bad deal financially and socially. I'm sure the prospect of sinking ~5yrs into some laser focused sub-field for garbage pay scares away a lot of potential--not including academia's useless bureaucracy cough GRE.
- geezerjay 9y ago
  > It's a shame how going through the hassle and politics of getting PhD (from a reputable school) is now almost a requirement for the cutting edge. Nowadays, a PhD is literally dedicated to carry out original research, which normally entails a curricular part that serves to help a candidate get up to date on the state of the art. Conducting original research is a natural requirement to be on the cutting edge of any scientific or technical field.
  - davemp 9y ago
    > a PhD is literally dedicated to carry out original research *for ~$30k/yr for five years > Conducting original research is a natural requirement to be on the cutting edge of any scientific or technical field. I'm not saying that a PhD won't prepare you. Just that it's inefficient in terms of stress/time/money.
    - geezerjay 9y ago
      > *for ~$30k/yr for five years Perhaps that's a US thing. In most european countries (if not all), not only are the costs significantly lower but each state sets up research programs where PhD candidates are actually paid to pursue their studies. Those PhD positions are limited and in some places the pay tends to be somewhat low, but still PhD candidates do get paid for their work. There are also programs where private companies can participate in PhD programs as part of their R&D investment, and enable their employees to pursuit PhDs while working for them.
      - 9y ago

tbrock 9y ago

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?

jrs95 9y ago
There's a lot of challenging & low level work to be done in the stuff Tesla is working on, and a lot of it will essentially be key in reinventing the auto industry. So I don't think it's necessarily fair to dismiss what he might be doing now as beneath what he's done in the past.
VT_Drew 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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.
- chedda7 9y ago
  Do you have source on Tesla using AMD chips?
- tbrock 9y ago
  Better not drive fast on the same roads over and over, the car might crash!

agumonkey 9y ago

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

dijit 9y ago
>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 9y ago
  I think he was being facetious. That is a remarkable list of accomplishments.
  - agumonkey 9y ago
    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.
aidenn0 9y ago
You forgot Pwrficient, and he worked on some of the DEC Alpha processors as well.

Hikikomori 9y ago

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

compton_effect 9y ago
Yup. I think what Keller's main talents are in putting together and leading a great team.
- greglindahl 9y ago
  ... and is this a guess? Have you met him, worked with him?

powercf 9y ago

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.

sremani 9y ago
In our 5000 years of recorded History, the Leader gets the glory and/or the sword. Now a days, they do get Golden parachutes but attributing success to Leaders (and in many cases rightfully so) has not changed.
santoshalper 9y ago
No doubt, but on the other hand, look at his resume. Every project he has led has been a huge success, and when he left AMD for a time, they floundered. Lots of people work hard and contribute, but the value of a top leader is undeniable.
VT_Drew 9y ago
And Apple was more than Jobs and Woz, but they get all the credit.
- chaostheory 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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.

examancer 9y ago

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).

KSS42 9y ago
I completely agree, she deserves more credit. BTW, I have always seen her name written as Lisa Su. Why do you write Zu?
edenblitz 9y ago
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-new-micro-architecture-for-2015-launch-under-chip-guru-jim-keller https://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news/2344223/amd-to-design-n... I think assuming that the reason he's getting credit is specifically to slight a woman being CEO is baseless.