17 ms·
Jim Keller Resigns from Intel, Effective Immediately
- realthing 6y agoamd baby
- headalgorithm 6y agoSee recent discussion (with Intel's announcement): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23493046 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23493046
- fireattack 6y agoThe article mentioned he joined as VP 2 years ago. Did he still hold this same position at leave?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- gigatexal 6y agoI’m hoping he joins Apple as an advisor on some really high end ARM chip for the Mac Pro or something like that
- harpratap 6y agoIt's better if he goes to Nuvia if you want him to do that.
- gigatexal 6y agoAre they working with Apple? I thought Apple is suing them?
- harpratap 6y agoNo. 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 6y agoIf 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
- harpratap 6y agoNever really used ARM to know whether such disparity exists. Maybe it's similar to that of AVX2 on Intel vs AMD - minor differences but generally things would work across SoCs just fine.
- als0 6y agoThe 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 6y agoThis has changed slightly, recently. https://www.eetasia.com/arm-opens-instruction-set-architecture/ https://www.eetasia.com/arm-opens-instruction-set-architectu...
- IanCutress 6y agoApple isn't suing Nuvia. They're suing Gerard Williams III directly as an individual.
- 95014_refugee 6y agoNot too sure that Gerard would want anything to do with Jim again. Or vice versa.
- ksec 6y agoWhy is that? Did I miss something?
- StreamBright 6y agoOr Apple could switch to AMD. Maybe both! :)
- brisance 6y agoMoving to ARM is enough of a technical challenge, doubt they would want to divert even more resources to supporting AMD.
- StreamBright 6y agoYeah me too, it would be great to see AMD cpus instead of the Intel ones in the x86 offerings. In theory it shouldn't be a huge change. Moving to ARM is much more challenging but Apple has done such project before.
- s_dev 6y agoThis will affect Intel share price -- Keller was behind the magic at any CPU company he worked for. Things are looking very bad for Intel.
- 95014_refugee 6y agoNot always, if ever.
- ant6n 6y agoDidn´t he leave AMD several months before Zen launched?
- dijit 6y agoYes, 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.
- alimbada 6y agoTheir stock buybacks are keeping the share price afloat for now. Interested to see how long they'll keep that up.
- bob1029 6y agoSo - 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 6y ago"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 6y agoThis! 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 6y agoThere 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.
- csharptwdec19 6y ago> Also health reasons have the advantage that it is a legal minefield to ask for details. FTFY. 'Health reasons' are a subject that companies typically won't probe into because of existing legislation around Employers knowing employee's health information (And/or health discrimination lawsuit exposure). 'Family Issues' OTOH is something that's rude to ask about but far less likely to be problematic to actually go into. Also something that I probably -would- ask about in an interview because I'd like to know whether they could come up again.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- cepth 6y agoWhat 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-intel-fortune-500-apple-tesla-amd/ https://fortune.com/longform/microchip-designer-jim-keller-i...). > 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”.
- baybal2 6y agoI heard that he had a speech impediment before. Never felt that he did when I first saw him speaking on hot chips.
- SuoDuanDao 6y agoHm, I remember a highly requested Joe Rogan guest talking about how he got over a speech impediment. Wonder whether there's a connection.
- wand3r 6y agoStamets?
- systemBuilder 6y agoAt 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 6y agoThat 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.
- tedk-42 6y agoWild guess is he'll end up at Amazon if he went down the ARM route
- camillomiller 6y agoOr back at Apple. Or overseeing TSMC’s strategical US expansion...
- afwaller 6y agoApple’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.
- mardifoufs 6y agoIs 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 6y agoYou 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.
- hutzlibu 6y agoWere those comments wiped away? I cannot see any of them, also not in the dead section.
- mardifoufs 6y agoThere are a few weird comments left, but I could swear a lot of them have been deleted since I made the first comment. It's much better now!
- pwdisswordfish2 6y agoTo see all the comments: https://www.anandtech.com/Show/Index/15846?all=True https://www.anandtech.com/Show/Index/15846?all=True
- wtallis 6y agoThat isn't quite our usual style of troll, and it seems to be coming mostly from a pair of brand-new accounts.
- api 6y agoMainstream news comments make me feel like we are on the precipice of the collapse of civilization.
- aswanson 6y ago
- botwriter 6y agoHopefully, he and his family are ok and safe. When people say leaving for health reason's you almost always think that the person or their wife has cancer.
- daniel_iversen 6y agoWonder 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?
- kurtv 6y agoIt's getting rarer and rarer to see a resignation not prompted by a tweet.
- orphs12 6y agoIt's getting rarer and rarer to see a resignation not prompted by a tweet.
- blueblisters 6y agoIntel 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?
- libertine 6y agoSomehow I can't feel sorry for Intel, because they put themselves in that position - in fact - they even prepared the ground to be in that position, so wasn't just "luck", was a strategy. Anti competitive practices that put AMD on a tight spot, that could have rolled over at any time. Milking their comfortable position with high margin products, due to a choked out competitor and marketing deals. They had it coming.
- geerlingguy 6y agoWell in one bright spot there are a lot more libraries and packages available or at least able to be compiled on arm64 or amd64 in the past year. Two is better than one.
- Zigurd 6y agoAlmost 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 6y ago> 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++.
- 6y ago
- 7demons 6y agoResignations without a clear reason may indicate health problems. Probably cancer, at his age it is most common health issue. Best of luck to him.
- carlsborg 6y agoI 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 6y agoSorry 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
- throwaway6497 6y agoI 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.
- paulcole 6y agoWhat you are describing is not somehow unique to “tech.” It’s baked into literally every industry.
- fsloth 6y agoActually 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 6y agoIn 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.
- mumpsman 6y agoI once interviewed with Jim Keller. He was incredibly down to earth and when I pointed out that I wouldn't have ever expected to get an interview with the guy who developed the Athlon 64, he laughed and said that it wasn't he who designed it---it was the huge team of engineers following his guidance. So I got the impression that Jim wasn't looking to take all the credit.
- ezoe 6y agoHow 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?
- arcanus 6y ago> But doesn't the huge project like CPU development require a lot of good workers rather than one genius? Yes. Intel has over one hundred thousand employees. AMD, which does not have fabs, has over ten thousand.
- cwizou 6y agoBut only a tiny fraction of those work on CPU development, so it's not exactly a fair comparison. It's definitely not a numbers game. However, Intel has (used to have ? I haven't followed recently but I'd be surprised it changed) two separate design teams, one in Oregon, the other in Haifa, working in a sort of "tick tock" way (each would work on one set of tick-tock when that was still a thing), so that, at least, was definitely an advantage in terms of numbers for them. Whether those were efficient thanks to Intel's management/bureaucracy or, mattered at all since the 2015 process issues, however, is a a completely different story.
- Guthur 6y agoYes CPU are designed by teams, but to effectively build a world class product you need a world class team and world class leadership. Keller has proven time and again he can lead world class teams effectively.
- sunstone 6y agoJust like a cathedral, there's an architect and then there's the implementers.
- chooseaname 6y ago> But doesn't the huge project like CPU development require a lot of good workers rather than one genius? It requires a lot of good workers and one genius. Some people are just masters at seeing the big picture.
- AbuAssar 6y agoWhen 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?
- GiorgioG 6y agoHe left AMD for Tesla, then to Intel. My guess is he's a rockstar and he negotiated better non-compete terms.
- twirlip 6y agoNon-compete clauses are void in California.
- mipmap04 6y agoYou 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 6y ago> 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 6y agoWhat if one is being laid off and the company offers them a severance package of X weeks pay for signing some papers?
- krisroadruck 6y agoX weeks for a 2 year non-compete? nah. Make it equal to the duration of the non-compete and then we might be talking.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- DarmokJalad1701 6y agoAnd the silicon ronin is off again!
- Unklejoe 6y agoTotally random, but I would pay a lot of money to attend an "Intro to microprocessor design" class taught by this guy.
- kens 6y agoIs 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.
- Balgair 6y agoWant to tell us about a good book on the basics in the mean time?
- jasonwatkinspdx 6y agoHennessy and Patterson's Computer Architecture remains the bible.
- rramadass 6y agoModern Processor Design: Fundamentals of Superscalar Processors by Shen & Lipasti Computer System Design: System-on-Chip by Flynn & Luk
- marceloabsousa 6y agoHow much money are we talking about? :)
- eruditegamer420 6y agoProbably didn't get along with the woketard morons that have been running Intel into the ground for the past decade with minority quota hires
- SMAAART 6y ago"personal reasons"
- oasisbob 6y ago"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 6y agoWhat do you mean? They have a Related Reading section. I searched "Check" on the page and nothing came.
- oasisbob 6y agoWhen 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 6y agoI’m not experiencing that functionality on iOS.
- evtothedev 6y agoThis 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 6y agoI 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.
- nolok 6y agoAd "framework" with audio, the poor underpaid soul who compose the final ad doesn't have the abilities, knowledge or care to disable that function when copy pasting from the previous ad he made.