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Jim Keller to Depart Intel
- planck01 6y agoAnd...back to AMD?
- jaas 6y agoIt says "for personal reasons," which is not text I would expect if he was just going to another company.
- gigatexal 6y agoHe could have had a falling out with Intel losing their edge
- nickysielicki 6y agoThese things are in development for many years before they hit silicon, I don't think his time at intel has been long enough for that to be true. More likely, IMO, is that the same bureaucracy that lead to intel falling behind drives people like Keller away. If scaling pipelines is hard, scaling pipeline pipelines is harder.
- taurath 6y agoAccountant management. Current CEO came up thru finance. Knows how to hold a dividend steady but not a wafer.
- close04 6y agoHe was probably there specifically to help Intel regain that edge. But he may not have received enough support to implement his vision, or simply he had a personal reason to leave.
- me_me_me 6y agoI would say that actually this is the time where you can have more freedom to get things done and be able take bigger risks. Intel has to change something to catch up with AMD. So I imagine the 'play safe' people have less power now.
- elihu 6y agoAlso, he's agreed to stay on as a consultant for the next six months, which I assume is not something you'd do if you were planning on working for a competitor at the same time.
- jgeada 6y ago6 months is not an atypical non-compete clause length.
- culturestate 6y agoI obviously haven't seen his contract but it would surprise me if the noncompete clock started before his final day as a consultant. If it did, that would sort of eliminate the value of having a noncompete in the first place, wouldn't it?
- greggyb 6y agoI left a company with a noncompete in place (it was largely valid) and did consulting work for them. The two relationships are completely separate. As a full time employee, I had signed the noncompete. As soon as my full time employment ended, the term of the noncompete began counting down. My later relationship with the company was completely separate, with its own contract (which I ensured had no non-compete clauses). I could easily see similar happening for Jim, here. The full time role has expired, and there is a new, separate contract for consulting work.
- culturestate 6y agoI've done similar things in the past, but my value to those companies' competitors was much lower than Keller's would be, presumably, to someone like AMD vis-a-vis internal problems and short-term strategic thinking. The importance of enforcing a noncompete and accompanying garden leave increases pretty linearly with how senior you are in your industry, in my experience. Either way, I imagine we'll find out soon enough.
- londons_explore 6y agoWhen someone really has personal reasons, they usually "take a sabbatical" or are "off on sick leave". For this kind of person, Intel gains a lot simply having his name associated with the company, so would have no qualms giving him years to travel the world on a yacht if he wanted to. I think it really means "Intel didn't fire me, but I don't want to say any more".
- m463 6y agoI've personally known people who leave with that line and surface at a new company shortly thereafter.
- spamizbad 6y agoI'm guessing a project he was working on either wrapped up or got canned. He had previously helped AMD with their Zen architecture.
- systemvoltage 6y agoMy guess is he is going back to Apple.
- londons_explore 6y agoHe's been at Apple before. Doubt he'll go back to a place he's been before unless he thinks the landscape has changed enough he can have a really big impact again. I don't think thats the case at Apple. No - I think he'll go to Nvidia, because he hasn't been there before, hasn't really worked on GPU's before, and because I think GPU's could gain a lot of performance by having someone look at optimizing the big picture, adding the right abstraction layers, and generally making a GPU more CPU-like to allow more execution to be moved to it more easily.
- systemvoltage 6y agoLol my guess is as good as yours and everyone else’s.
- justinclift 6y agoWonder if he'd be interested in doing stuff with Mellanox's tech?
- codebook 6y agoI think he may go to Google? or Facebook?
- culturestate 6y ago> Doubt he'll go back to a place he's been before unless he thinks the landscape has changed enough he can have a really big impact again He did two separate stints at AMD, and if the rumors of Apple switching the Mac to the A-series are true (which they probably are) then there will be some very interesting problems to solve over the next few years.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- seebetter 6y agoJim’s talk with Lex Friedman was quite amazing. Highly recommend listening- https://youtu.be/Nb2tebYAaOA https://youtu.be/Nb2tebYAaOA
- imjasonmiller 6y ago> If you constantly unpacked everything for deeper understanding, you're never going to get anything done. If you don't unpack understanding when you need to, you'll do the wrong thing. I really liked that quote. It's a great talk indeed.
- gigatexal 6y agoamazing podcast episode for sure, I wonder where Keller will go next. It'd be insane if he went to AMD or Apple in their new ARM push.
- castratikron 6y agoAmazing how he didn't know how to read until age 8, and then read two books a week up to now (about 50 years)
- person_of_color 6y agoThis baffles me. How do you tradeoff with learning and “doing” i.e writing code or putting what you have learnt into practice? I can’t finish a technical book without getting the urge to implement
- gyre007 6y ago
- pranith 6y agoWishing him good luck and healthy life.
- walrus01 6y agoResigned effective immediately, announced the same day due to "personal reasons" is not a good look. Anyone who's spent a sufficient amount of time reading $BIGCORP press releases immediately sees how it stands out from the usual PR fluff. In situations where I have seen that in the past, the person was caught in grievously bad, unambiguous case of sexual harassment, racism or something equally socially despised. If this is not the case, Intel's PR people are doing a serious disservice to Keller in the way the announcement has been structured. Generally if a higher level executive resigns due to actual "personal reasons" or a family tragedy, and it's an amicable departure, it's announced with at least a few weeks notice.
- skummetmaelk 6y agoOr they find out they have an aggressive terminal illness.
- znpy 6y agoThat would be a reasonable explanation... But let's hope it's not that.
- hn_throwaway_99 6y agoYour throwing of shade is unwarranted: > Intel is pleased to announce, however, that Mr. Keller has agreed to serve as a consultant for six months to assist with the transition.
- data_spy 6y agoI agree with the shade bit, however, I've personally seen several high visibility execs 'fired' with this exact line about staying on for 6 months for the transition. I've never seen anyone stay longer than 4 weeks.
- walrus01 6y agoIf I'm being critical of anyone, it's the person who wrote the press release and decided on the "effective immediately" and same date, not Keller. They have to be aware of the optics of it.
- jimbob45 6y agoThat’s a huge surprise. For reference, Intel’s stock is down 6.5% today (on what is admittedly a historically bad day for the market to begin with).
- Rebelgecko 6y agoI don't know that those are necessarily correlated. The S&P500 is also down by 6%. NVidia is down by 6%. AMD is actually down by 8%
- Exmoor 6y agoA good person leaving a company drives the company's stock price down. A truly great person leaving a company drives entire industry's stock down. (tongue in cheek)
- klohto 6y agoIf Jim is going back to Apple or AMD then the Intel struggle won’t stop anytime soon. As much as I like Apple, I hope his choice will be AMD.
- ksec 6y agoEvery time I criticise Intel, Or more like pointing out facts , supporters will always use Jim Keller as the excuse, as if he was the silver bullet. Intel's struggle has nothing to do with is processors' design. Sunny Cove and Willow Cove ( aka Icelake and TigerLake ) were close to design complete before Jim Keller joined. Intel's problem is with their manufacturing, both technical and economical. And Jim Keller is not a Fab guy, nothing he could do to fix this.
- jimbob45 6y agoWhy do you say their problem is based in manufacturing?
- The_Colonel 6y agoThey have been working on the 10nm manufacturing process for ages and it's still not completely finished. That gave AMD huge opportunity to catch up (which it did).
- londons_explore 6y agoNothing stops Intel manufacturing their designs with third parties. Yet they don't. Either it isn't worth it (too much coupling between fab and designs - not the right abstractions), or institutional inertia stops them doing it.
- theevilsharpie 6y ago> Nothing stops Intel manufacturing their designs with third parties. Yet they don't. It wouldn't surprise me if the reason Keller left is because he wanted to outsource manufacturing to a competitive third party fab, and got denied. Keller is an a computer architect, but architecture doesn't matter if you can't physically build the thing.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- eatbitseveryday 6y agoMy guesses to this are either 1) leaving due to not a good culture fit or 2) literally a personal reason (e.g., health). Intel has a culture which isn't exactly amenable to working flexibly, or to someone coming in and making lots of changes to the culture itself.
- fizixer 6y agoBest guess: Jim Keller came in with guns blazing about how Moore's law is not dead and if you believe so you're stupid. He was a comp-architecture guy counting on the device/physics folks to deliver. They didn't, while Jim put his reputation on the line. He probably resigned in disappointment and/or protest. - Moore's law is dead at the physics level. - Exponential tech progress doesn't stop but it won't be in the form of Si FETs, at least not in the foreseeable future. - There is plenty of opportunity at the higher layers of abstraction though. - Fortunately the AGI problem has escaped Moore's law (AGI can happen with existing node technology). And in my opinion that's all that matters for the next 10 years.
- qeternity 6y agoIf AGI is solved, it most certainly won’t be in the next decade and will not be economical on current node tech.
- aceperry 6y agoWhat is the AGI problem? I've never heard of it.
- scriptdevil 6y agoArtificial General Intelligence.
- ccmcarey 6y agoGot a source for that AGI claim?
- fizixer 6y agoSource is me. (Of all the naysayers who I've come across in the past many years, if a tenth of them were willing to fund me to work on AGI, by now I'd be well on my way to prove them wrong. But therein lies the rub. Why would they spend money on being proven wrong?)
- 6y ago
- CalChris 6y agoJim Keller giving a talk on Moore's Law at Berkeley, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIG9ztQw2Gc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIG9ztQw2Gc And another https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eT1jaHmlx8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eT1jaHmlx8 And another https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qnl7--MvNAM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qnl7--MvNAM DEC, PA Semi, Apple, AMD, Tesla, Intel. He's been everywhere. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Keller_(engineer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Keller_(engineer) The internal announcement memo: https://wccftech.com/exclusive-intel-internal-memo-jim-keller-departure-new-structure/ https://wccftech.com/exclusive-intel-internal-memo-jim-kelle...
- systemvoltage 6y agoI like it when they’re introducing him and during the introduction he was praised for “Zen Architecture”; you can see Jim in the background shaking his head - sign of humility that he is not alone, amazing engineering team that made that happen under his leadership. This kind of humility is rare.
- vicpara 6y agoIt's so funny to hear the interviewer explaining to Jim what he understands. All this happening after in the first part of the interview he couldn't compute the answer Jim gave when explaining predicting branches. Also he's in no position to push back on ideas. As if I really care what the interviewer care or not. It's such a pity the interviewer didn't prepare more technical questions that touch on the new architectures, compilers, cache, TPUs and his design experience. I only care about him asking good questions. Jim equally seems incredibly engaged and patient with the questions sometime moving the game to a lot higher level than at which the question was posed. Without breaking a sweat.
- gameswithgo 6y agointerviewer is a domain expert in AI, which maybe explain what he pushed back and what he didn’t delve deeper into
- pepoluan 6y agoWow. This likely throws a wrench in Intel's ability to design a revolutionary "Non Core" architecture free of all the security vulnerabilities that have been plaguing the Core family due to unsafe shortcuts in the name of performance. Here's to hoping that in the 2 years Keller had been in Intel, he had left many good, realizable ideas on how to overhaul Intel's CPU architecture. If not, then this news might be the death knell for Intel's CPU might for the next decade.
- BearOso 6y agoGiven the lifetime of CPU design, if Intel releases a revolutionary new architecture in two years, we’ll know where it came from.
- KKKKkkkk1 6y agoBloomberg has the following commentary: “Keller’s departure is a big deal and suggests that whatever he was implementing at Intel was not working or the old Intel guard did not want to implement it,” Hans Mosesmann, an analyst at Rosenblatt Securities, wrote in a note to investors. “The net of this situation for us is that Intel’s processor and process node roadmaps are going to be more in flux or broken than even we had expected.”
- Traster 6y agoIntel has some absolutely killer politics, especially at the higher level, entire organisations will plan road maps deliberately contingent on deliverables they know other teams are going to miss. I wouldn't be surprised if this was the result of Keller just having enough of it and giving up. The fact that the press release involves an already resolved organisational structure that looks highly political is a big red flag.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]