5 ms·

It wasn't just luck. It was Jim Keller. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Keller_%28engineer%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Keller_%28engineer%29

dbcooper 7y ago
Has he ever written about his management technique? He must be a great engineering manager.
- electic 7y ago
  There are some tidbits here about how he views his team and some stories: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOTFE7sJY-Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOTFE7sJY-Q
ac29 7y ago
Given that he was only at AMD for 3 years and now works for Intel, I wonder if AMD will be struggling again after Zen 2/3 -- I seem to recall he designed "multiple" Zen versions before leaving, but cant find any comments from AMD to that effect.
- clarry 7y ago
  Regardless of who designed it, I'm concerned about how much progress Zen3 (and so on) can make. Zen was a massive leap, Zen 2 looks like it'll be a great upgrade, but can it go on like this? If not, what happens next? "AMD didn't absolutely blast Intel out of the water, so let's all go back to buying nothing but Intel."
  - nullwasamistake 7y ago
    Bulldozer was mistake that cost AMD years of advancements. They tried to do what Intel did a few years before. Design for clock speed and nothing else, figuring the 4ghz ceiling was easy to break. Intel did this with P4 "netburst" architecture. They hit a frequency wall that made thier new deeply pipelined CPU worthless. This is when AMD caught up last time with the athlon series. Intel actually went back to the design of the Pentium III!! With higher IPC, a few upgrades lifted from the P4, and new processes, it gave birth to the Core series. The Intel processors we have today still share more design history with the P3 than the P4. And since then, Intel has focused on IPC over clock speed. The crazy part was AMD making the same mistake years later with Bulldozer. Makes me wonder if the remedy was the same... Go back and update the Athlon cores. The ancient Athlon/P3 IPC is amazingly good compared to today's chips if you scale them by clock speed and core count. Perhaps half, which is impressive for the age of the chip. All these bugs affecting over a decade of CPU design tells us these chips share a lot of the same logic, if not entire blocks unchanged for more than a decade.
    - ShinTakuya 7y ago
      > The crazy part was AMD making the same mistake years later with Bulldozer. Makes me wonder if the remedy was the same... Go back and update the Athlon cores. I mean at the time the only thing on the minds of consumers was those GHz. So the only way to stay in the market was to hunt those GHz even if it meant some long term pain. After hitting the 3GHz/4GHz frequency walls consumers began to realise that processors are distinguished by more than frequency (obviously the lay person still doesn't quite understand but they're more likely to buy based on i7 > i5 than 3Ghz > 2.5Ghz these days).
      - clarry 7y ago
        > I mean at the time the only thing on the minds of consumers was those GHz. No, AMD dispelled that long before Bulldozer, and even Intel had abandoned the GHz game years ago with the Core lineup. You're thinking late 90s, Bulldozer happened in 2011. People got over the GHz mindset in the early-mid 2000s when the market told 'em we're now going to increase core count instead, and before that when Athlon labeled CPUs like 1800+ (it's not 1.8GHz but it's as fast as one!).
    - rjsw 7y ago
      I'm typing this on a Bulldozer system. It is still fine for what I need it for - mostly compiling software, and provided a lot more cores than the equivalent Intel CPU at the same price point.
      - potta_coffee 7y ago
        I'm still using mine for gaming daily, obviously it's not high end, but it was $99 like...9 years ago? I don't remember when actually. I've been computing since I was young and it's the best value I've ever purchased. I can still do just about anything I want to right now.
      - eropple 7y ago
        Nobody's saying they were unusable. But like--I do video production and was pricing out my first live video mixer around that time. I was ready to throw down for a Bulldozer build immediately because of how wide the processor was and had to do the proverbial "hard pull up away from the mountainside" because of how bad the throughput was. Instead, ended up going i7-875K -> i5-3570K -> Ryzen 1600 -> Ryzen 3700X (probably, this year). So like, I'm glad to see AMD back in the game, but Bulldozer was pretty rough.
SOLAR_FIELDS 7y ago
Hilariously, the one takeaway I have from that article is that no one wants to lead the autopilot arm of Tesla.
- Simple_Guy 7y ago
  my take is he's Jordan Peterson's brother-in-law
- Traster 7y ago
  It's certainly not a great sign that less than 1 month before Musk is parading around screaming that they've got self-driving solved, the head of the project has jumped ship.
  - vectorEQ 7y ago
    maybe they can put that department on autopilot :O
  - auiya 7y ago
    Also - https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/17/tesla-shares-fall-on-report-autopilot-system-was-engaged-during-crash.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/17/tesla-shares-fall-on-report-...
rohan1024 7y ago
> Jim Keller is married to Bonnie Peterson, sister of Jordan Peterson I am not from USA but apparently I know a lot about USA and its people. My friends who moved there keep sending me memes and jokes from there and I almost always understand what the context is. Maybe I'll fit right in if I ever moved there.
dasmoth 7y ago
I hadn't realised he'd ended up at Intel! Will be interesting to see how much impact he has there.
- otakucode 7y ago
  From what I've read about Intel's corporate structure - don't hold your breath.
friendlybus 7y ago
Oh he's the guy JP mentions every now and then when talking about AI.
CodeArtisan 7y ago
And the expiration of a few patents, like the ones about simultaneous multithreading. Zen is the first AMD's architecture to implement SMT, Bulldozer had CMT (https://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/zen.jpg https://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/zen.j...). https://patents.google.com/patent/US3728692 https://patents.google.com/patent/US3728692 https://patents.google.com/patent/US3771138 https://patents.google.com/patent/US3771138 https://scalibq.wordpress.com/2012/02/14/the-myth-of-cmt-cluster-based-multithreading/ https://scalibq.wordpress.com/2012/02/14/the-myth-of-cmt-clu...
- BeeOnRope 7y ago
  Don't Intel and AMD have a fairly comprehensive patent cross-licensing agreement? Not sure if SMT parents would fall under that, but it was my impression that AMD was relatively unconstrained wrt Intel patents due to this agreement.
  - CodeArtisan 7y ago
    The agreement can be read here https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/2488/000119312509236705/dex102.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/2488/000119312509236... I would say that only the Instruction set is cross licensed, implementation techniques and hardware interfaces aren't (AMD CPUs shall not be compatible with Intel sockets, for example). Intel's SMT is known as hyper-threading, the patent has expired too but the name "hyper-threading" is still copyright protected and the property of Intel. https://patents.google.com/patent/US5361337A/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US5361337A/en https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper-threading#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper-threading#History
otakucode 7y ago
Yeah, once AMD was desperate enough to kick the MBA CEOs to the curb and finally put an engineer in charge, things started working better. Imagine that.

dbcooper 7y ago

Has he ever written about his management technique? He must be a great engineering manager.

electic 7y ago
There are some tidbits here about how he views his team and some stories: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOTFE7sJY-Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOTFE7sJY-Q

ac29 7y ago

Given that he was only at AMD for 3 years and now works for Intel, I wonder if AMD will be struggling again after Zen 2/3 -- I seem to recall he designed "multiple" Zen versions before leaving, but cant find any comments from AMD to that effect.

clarry 7y ago
Regardless of who designed it, I'm concerned about how much progress Zen3 (and so on) can make. Zen was a massive leap, Zen 2 looks like it'll be a great upgrade, but can it go on like this? If not, what happens next? "AMD didn't absolutely blast Intel out of the water, so let's all go back to buying nothing but Intel."
- nullwasamistake 7y ago
  Bulldozer was mistake that cost AMD years of advancements. They tried to do what Intel did a few years before. Design for clock speed and nothing else, figuring the 4ghz ceiling was easy to break. Intel did this with P4 "netburst" architecture. They hit a frequency wall that made thier new deeply pipelined CPU worthless. This is when AMD caught up last time with the athlon series. Intel actually went back to the design of the Pentium III!! With higher IPC, a few upgrades lifted from the P4, and new processes, it gave birth to the Core series. The Intel processors we have today still share more design history with the P3 than the P4. And since then, Intel has focused on IPC over clock speed. The crazy part was AMD making the same mistake years later with Bulldozer. Makes me wonder if the remedy was the same... Go back and update the Athlon cores. The ancient Athlon/P3 IPC is amazingly good compared to today's chips if you scale them by clock speed and core count. Perhaps half, which is impressive for the age of the chip. All these bugs affecting over a decade of CPU design tells us these chips share a lot of the same logic, if not entire blocks unchanged for more than a decade.
  - ShinTakuya 7y ago
    > The crazy part was AMD making the same mistake years later with Bulldozer. Makes me wonder if the remedy was the same... Go back and update the Athlon cores. I mean at the time the only thing on the minds of consumers was those GHz. So the only way to stay in the market was to hunt those GHz even if it meant some long term pain. After hitting the 3GHz/4GHz frequency walls consumers began to realise that processors are distinguished by more than frequency (obviously the lay person still doesn't quite understand but they're more likely to buy based on i7 > i5 than 3Ghz > 2.5Ghz these days).
    - clarry 7y ago
      > I mean at the time the only thing on the minds of consumers was those GHz. No, AMD dispelled that long before Bulldozer, and even Intel had abandoned the GHz game years ago with the Core lineup. You're thinking late 90s, Bulldozer happened in 2011. People got over the GHz mindset in the early-mid 2000s when the market told 'em we're now going to increase core count instead, and before that when Athlon labeled CPUs like 1800+ (it's not 1.8GHz but it's as fast as one!).
  - rjsw 7y ago
    I'm typing this on a Bulldozer system. It is still fine for what I need it for - mostly compiling software, and provided a lot more cores than the equivalent Intel CPU at the same price point.
    - potta_coffee 7y ago
      I'm still using mine for gaming daily, obviously it's not high end, but it was $99 like...9 years ago? I don't remember when actually. I've been computing since I was young and it's the best value I've ever purchased. I can still do just about anything I want to right now.
    - eropple 7y ago
      Nobody's saying they were unusable. But like--I do video production and was pricing out my first live video mixer around that time. I was ready to throw down for a Bulldozer build immediately because of how wide the processor was and had to do the proverbial "hard pull up away from the mountainside" because of how bad the throughput was. Instead, ended up going i7-875K -> i5-3570K -> Ryzen 1600 -> Ryzen 3700X (probably, this year). So like, I'm glad to see AMD back in the game, but Bulldozer was pretty rough.

SOLAR_FIELDS 7y ago

Hilariously, the one takeaway I have from that article is that no one wants to lead the autopilot arm of Tesla.

Simple_Guy 7y ago
my take is he's Jordan Peterson's brother-in-law
Traster 7y ago
It's certainly not a great sign that less than 1 month before Musk is parading around screaming that they've got self-driving solved, the head of the project has jumped ship.
- vectorEQ 7y ago
  maybe they can put that department on autopilot :O
- auiya 7y ago
  Also - https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/17/tesla-shares-fall-on-report-autopilot-system-was-engaged-during-crash.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/17/tesla-shares-fall-on-report-...

rohan1024 7y ago

> Jim Keller is married to Bonnie Peterson, sister of Jordan Peterson I am not from USA but apparently I know a lot about USA and its people. My friends who moved there keep sending me memes and jokes from there and I almost always understand what the context is. Maybe I'll fit right in if I ever moved there.

dasmoth 7y ago

I hadn't realised he'd ended up at Intel! Will be interesting to see how much impact he has there.

otakucode 7y ago
From what I've read about Intel's corporate structure - don't hold your breath.

friendlybus 7y ago

Oh he's the guy JP mentions every now and then when talking about AI.

CodeArtisan 7y ago

And the expiration of a few patents, like the ones about simultaneous multithreading. Zen is the first AMD's architecture to implement SMT, Bulldozer had CMT (https://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/zen.jpg https://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/zen.j...). https://patents.google.com/patent/US3728692 https://patents.google.com/patent/US3728692 https://patents.google.com/patent/US3771138 https://patents.google.com/patent/US3771138 https://scalibq.wordpress.com/2012/02/14/the-myth-of-cmt-cluster-based-multithreading/ https://scalibq.wordpress.com/2012/02/14/the-myth-of-cmt-clu...

BeeOnRope 7y ago
Don't Intel and AMD have a fairly comprehensive patent cross-licensing agreement? Not sure if SMT parents would fall under that, but it was my impression that AMD was relatively unconstrained wrt Intel patents due to this agreement.
- CodeArtisan 7y ago
  The agreement can be read here https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/2488/000119312509236705/dex102.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/2488/000119312509236... I would say that only the Instruction set is cross licensed, implementation techniques and hardware interfaces aren't (AMD CPUs shall not be compatible with Intel sockets, for example). Intel's SMT is known as hyper-threading, the patent has expired too but the name "hyper-threading" is still copyright protected and the property of Intel. https://patents.google.com/patent/US5361337A/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US5361337A/en https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper-threading#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper-threading#History

otakucode 7y ago

Yeah, once AMD was desperate enough to kick the MBA CEOs to the curb and finally put an engineer in charge, things started working better. Imagine that.