29 ms·

Brendan at Intel.com

397 points by ABS 4y ago

jupp0r 4y ago
Completely OT: is anybody else bothered by the use of capitalization in email addresses? I understand that it doesn't matter semantically, but I find myself thinking negatively of people who use this for some reason.
- userbinator 4y ago
  Especially when it's Intel, the company which traditionally has a lowercase i in its logo. Also rather OT: The Intel l219 or I219 or i219 must be one of the worst names ever for a NIC. Even Intel doesn't seem to know whether that first letter is an uppercase I or a lowercase l.
- jupp0r 4y ago
  Yes, I do know that theoretically there could be different mailboxes on a server that do depend on capitalization, but this is not really happening in practice as far as I'm aware.
  - niij 4y ago
    The RFC specifies that the local (left of the @) is treated as case sensitive[0] so it can have semantic meaning. In practice many hosted mail providers (Gmail, Yahoo, etc) treat their own accounts as case insensitive. But in MS Exchange, for example, you can have separate inboxes with only capitalization differences, so it's definitely not obscure. > local-part of a mailbox MUST BE treated as case sensitive. Therefore, SMTP implementations MUST take care to preserve the case of mailbox local-parts. In particular, for some hosts, the user "smith" is different from the user "Smith". 0: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5321#section-2.4 https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5321#section-2.4
    - singron 4y ago
      Google even lower cases emails when they are used for calendars, so you need to assume case insensitivity for that api to make sense.
    - jupp0r 4y ago
      Thanks, I didn't know about MS Exchange. I still haven't seen this happen in practice (ie differently capitalized emails not arriving, etc).
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
bluedino 4y ago
https://www.brendangregg.com/Images/brendan_clones2006.jpg https://www.brendangregg.com/Images/brendan_clones2006.jpg Is this some sort of training/demo room?
- brendangregg 4y ago
  Yes, a Sun Microsystems training room in Sydney. The entire building is now gone. I was teaching sysadmin and performance classes there in the early 2000s, for both internal and external staff.
- stargrave 4y ago
  More clones: https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2006-01-12/brendan-clones.html https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2006-01-12/brendan-clones....
  - brendangregg 4y ago
    Thanks, I forgot where that one was.
loki49152 4y ago
Sun machines always seemed to have weird environment-dependent behavior. In college, one of our classmates got the nickname "the human eclipse" because no matter what time of day, no matter what else was going on, when he walked into the Sun lab the machines all went down.
alimov 4y ago
Hadn’t heard of BPF prior to today. Anyone have experience working with BPF? Has the recent (past 3 or so years) interest in BPF had a big impact?
johndfsgdgdfg 4y ago
Does the Netflix earning decline have anything to do with his departure? The timeline seems to match up.
- jedberg 4y ago
  He announced the day the stock dropped, so no, he was already out before that.
markus_zhang 4y ago
Didn't know Intel has a dev cloud till now!
alberth 4y ago
Clear Linux. I wonder if Brendan will directly contribute to Clear Linux. It's already the fastest Linux distro by many benchmarks. His software contribution to a distro that is focused on Intel proc would be really interesting.
kubatyszko 4y ago
Coincidence with Netflix resignations and/or layoffs ?
n7pdx 4y ago
Will give him less than two years. High level individual contributors like him are absolute poison to the Intel bureaucracy.
rektide 4y ago
This tale of super talented engineers having no one under them, being individual contributors, feels too common. Im sure Netflix had some idea how valuable, how much money Brendan was saving/making them, but I still would not be surprised to hear organization impedance was sometimes an issue.
- rektide 4y ago
  Interesting & telling (& not at all what i meant!) is most replies celebrating IC's. It's a simplifcation for sure but "autonomy, mastery, & purpose" being the elements of fulfilment rings true however hou dice this. Personally I'd really like to see a lot of really good engineers given direct unfettered access to talent, given authority while trying to minimize their personell and management overheads: let the humam resources go wild, synergize, make good things. And stand the frak back. It's a gaping vast culutral loss that Brendan hasnt had a team of 10 under him. There are people missing from the world who would be way awesome & have done great things if Brendan had simply been tossed some people. Byt usually corporations statt having political games, attachments, commitments, things other than the work itself that comes with authority. Im fascinated by & not sure this world will ever get to grapple with just how core & essential a problem creating "low-drag" organizations is. Allowing itself to acknowledge that much of what it does is far more excellent & powerful than those in the chain of command can really.tap, harvest, understand, much less take credit for or manage. Orgs need an anti-gravity force, a depolitical defence, of stand the f back. Brendan's go do it figure it out brilliance needs a chance & positiom in this world, needs to be shareable. Or the idea of an organization is actually a hazard, is ossified & unworthy of being the thing that has overgrown this planet loke it has. Human dignity & potential should not remain so shadowed & bound.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- birdyrooster 4y ago
  Just keep heaping on the responsibility if they don't get burned out. Let's put these people to work. Better than me having to get off my ass.
- 4y ago
eatonphil 4y ago
> The title of this post is indeed my email address (I also used to be Brendan@Sun.com). The blog post title is "Brendan@Intel.com." HN formatting ruined a little bit of the fun of the blog post. :)
- capableweb 4y ago
  Too late by now, but "Brendan Inside" would have been an excellent title!
  - pphysch 4y ago
    Tim Apple, Brendan Intel, who next?
    - addaon 4y ago
      Mike Rowe Soft?
      - anon_123g987 4y ago
        Uzi Nissan.
        hasmanean 4y ago
        Nicholas Tesla.
- loudmax 4y ago
  In the blog post, Brendan Gregg confirms that that is indeed his actual email address at Intel. That's actually an impressive recognition of Brendan's capabilities. I wonder how many engineers at Intel have a <firstname>@intel.com email address.
  - westwardly 4y ago
    25, across a wide range of job titles. Source: I am an engineer at Intel.
capableweb 4y ago
There was some speculation in the previous thread about brendangregg on where they're going next ((https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31051662 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31051662)). Not a single person seems to have gotten it right :) Caught me a bit by surprise as well, as Intel seems to have stagnated a bit as of late, but the opening paragraph seems to indicate Brendan thinks otherwise, and who am I to disagree. I wish you luck on the new adventures, and hope you'll have tons of fun!
- MikePlacid 4y ago
  >Caught me a bit by surprise as well, as Intel seems to have stagnated a bit as of late The best place for an engineer to be (in my observation) - is at a company that faces a fierce competition. To envision, design and build a pipe pumping gold vs to exploit such a pipe when it is built - requires different skills. >I recently worked with another hardware vendor, who were initially friendly and supportive but after evaluations of their technology went poorly became bullying and misleading. I wonder who this is.
- alberth 4y ago
  Apparently Brendan has known Intels CTO for a long time (they both worked at Sun together) https://mobile.twitter.com/GregL_Intel/status/1520789156024098817?cxt=HHwWgoCp8cHr9poqAAAA https://mobile.twitter.com/GregL_Intel/status/15207891560240...
- neogodless 4y ago
  Intel has a ton of product lines, and a sort of parallel business of design and production, which they've started to split apart. Their core CPU design has managed to stay relevant (and profitable) despite issues with production, and has regained some measure of success with their 12th generation. Their production business has a good roadmap, but success in execution remains to be proven. GPU design is a bit of a wildcard, and I'm excited to see if it pans out. I would say it's fair to say that what came out of Intel certainly felt stagnant as the past decade drug on, but there's still promise that they remain competitive.
  - 4y ago
trishume 4y ago
I really hope he can work with cloud vendors and Intel to make Processor Trace a more popular and easier to use capability. It's unfortunate how https://github.com/janestreet/magic-trace https://github.com/janestreet/magic-trace and PMUs in general can't be used by lots of people using cloud VMs.
- brendangregg 4y ago
  Yes, getting PMCs enabled in VMs was just the start, I think the next hardware capabilities to enable are: - PEBS (Precise/Processor event based sampling, so that we can accurately get instruction pointers on PMC events) - uncore PMCs (in a safe manner) - LBR (last branch record, to aid stack walking) - BTS (branch trace store, " ") - Processor trace (for cycle traces) Processor trace may be the final boss. We've got through level 1, PMCs, now onto PEBS and beyond.
  - sydthrowaway 4y ago
    One question: are you hiring?
  - mhh__ 4y ago
    Can this be safely/efficiently virtualized? I love using these tools but post-spectre I could understand people being hesitant to expose more internal "state" (I.e. Technically unique to a VM but only one processor bug away from kaboom?). Congrats on the job.
    - dragontamer 4y ago
      On AMD systems, many hardware performance counters are locked behind BIOS flags/configuration. I admit that I don't know how Intel works, but disabling the use of these performance-counters at startup should be sufficient for any potential security problem. I'd expect that only development boxes (maybe staging?) would be interested in performance counters anyway. Maybe the occasional development box could be setup for performance-sampling and collecting these counters, but not all production boxes need to be run with performance-counters on.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
> The geeks are back with Pat Gelsinger and Greg Lavender as the CEO and CTO; This is something I am so excited to hear about Intel. As a consumer and user, I want Intel/Apple/AMD/NVidia all to be competitive and pushing the boundaries of what is possible in computing. So far Apple has done an amazing job with M1. AMD has had super success with Ryzen. Nvidia has had great success with GPUs. Recently, it seemed Intel was lagging, in large part due to their culture. It is exciting to see them get some "geeks" back in charge. It is an exciting time in computing!
- pavlov 4y ago
  This! And I'd also add Qualcomm to the list of CPU companies that I hope to succeed. Qualcomm is designing desktop-level ARM chips to compete with Apple's M series. The team came from Apple via a startup acquisition (Nuvia). Will be interesting to see how that turns out.
- User23 4y ago
  I strongly agree. It's my belief that companies whose management team has direct operational experience will long term outperform the ones run by bean counters. I'm very bullish on Intel's future!
- dboreham 4y ago
  Exciting for me because I worked with Greg Lavender long ago and had totally missed his rise to ultimate power!
natly 4y ago
This guy left netflix at an incredibly lucky timing (wrt the stock price)
- nicce 4y ago
  Netflix is an incredibly profitable company still. Investment world is really a messed place, when infinite growth is expected from public companies.
  - kolbe 4y ago
    For Netflix, I think the expectation used to be that they would establish themselves as a long-lasting company that would generate $20bn in profit per year. It's now looking dubious that they will exist in a meaningful way in a decade--that their value is now to milk the subscribers they have for all they're worth until they have no more.
  - RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
    Of the big tech companies, Netflix has the smallest most. Google has search. Apple has the iPhone. Microsoft has Windows and Office. Amazon has AWS and logistics. All of these are huge competitive moats. However, unlike when Netflix first started, the moat for streaming is not the tech it is the content. As such, Disney, Universal, etc which have decades worth of movies/shows have a huge advantage in this new reality where streaming can be implemented relatively easily.
    - conjecTech 4y ago
      Netflix's moat is the marginal unit economics of media. At present, they have twice the number of subscribers of the nearest competitor(Disney), and that ratio is probably far higher in non-US markets. They can outbid everyone for content and still deliver a service at a lower COGS than anyone else in the market. They still have to produce a high volume of good content, but it allows them far more mistakes in doing so. It also allows them to make content tailored to niches which aren't economic for others.
titzer 4y ago
Good luck Brendan! One project that I would find really interesting would be to leverage the insane capabilities of GPUs and 3d graphics to make extremely detailed visualizations of millions and billions of performance events, intervals, code paths, data structures, heat maps, and the like. It'd be great to get views beyond the raw data that are not oversimplified and useless, but rather to get the feeling of being at the helm of some seriously detailed (and precise!) data with zoomable resolution and a lot of assistance of analyzers to surface visual artifacts. I think it'd be both entertaining and highly productive to engage our visual cortex more.
throw0101a 4y ago
He's come a long way since yelling at hard drives in Sun's data centre: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4 * https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2008-12-31/unusual-disk-latency.html https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2008-12-31/unusual-disk-la...
- ignoramous 4y ago
  > My dream is to turn computer performance analysis into a science, one where we can completely understand the performance of everything: of applications, libraries, kernels, hypervisors, firmware, and hardware. Reminds me of Bret Victor's Inventing on Principle (2012), https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/PUv66718DII https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/PUv66718DII
- perch56 4y ago
  Forgot about the video and didn’t realize it’s the same person. Also reminded me of this 2016 incident that happened in an ING data center https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-37337868.amp https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-37337868.amp
  - teddyh 4y ago
    Fire suppression systems are no joke: https://www.sanitarium.net/jokes/getjoke.cgi?183 https://www.sanitarium.net/jokes/getjoke.cgi?183
- hobo_mark 4y ago
  That's him?!? That was thirteen years ago?!? I have to sit down for a minute...
- orangepanda 4y ago
  I wonder for how long they were debugging the performance issue, when screaming at a server rack seemed a worthwhile idea
- maxmcd 4y ago
  A video posted by Bryan Cantrill no less.
tedd4u 4y ago
Was hoping he would end up somewhere working on accelerating ARM in cloud platforms. But Intel is good, too :D
dragontamer 4y ago
I've followed a lot of Brendan's low-level talks and blogposts, and have always enjoyed them. Good luck at Intel! They do seem like a group that would be interested in the low-level optimization expertise Brendan clearly has!
mrlonglong 4y ago
Sort out the AVX-512 débâcle and maybe adopt some form of the insanely cool vector instructions arm64 uses for a start ...
- dragontamer 4y ago
  > insanely cool vector instructions arm64 Which ones would those be? SVE is somewhat interesting, but I've generally found the AVX512 instructions more innovative. I really like AVX512's "compress" and "expand" instructions, for example... as well as the classic "vpermb" (but vector-permutation has been around since SSE and is an old trick: the old pshufb instruction). Since SVE doesn't want to "set" its SIMD-width, it seems like these permute instructions (vpermb, or even compress/expand) aren't possible? ------- I've always enjoyed Intel's innovative new instructions: PEXT, PDEP, and now AVX512 compress and AVX512 expand. AVX512 also includes gather/scatter (but that's not innovative, been around for a long time but still nice to see it in prosumer systems)
  - astrange 4y ago
    SVE is interesting but I'm surprised it actually works. A vector instruction set where you can change the vector width sounds like the classic CISC instruction that ends up unusably slow because it's microcoded. And yet ARM has it and x86 doesn't? Also, it's an implementation choice to let you set SVE widths that aren't a power of two?
  - mochomocha 4y ago
    Can you expand on why you find AVX512 instructions more innovative? I haven't had a chance to try SVE yet, but on paper it sounds very innovative and offers a wide range of new capabilities. Gather/scatter have been around for a while, but it hasn't been until more recent Intel uarch that their cost makes them worth using in practice. Zen3 is still lagging quite a bit.
    - dragontamer 4y ago
      I've seen real-life situations in the past 5 years (albeit with my personal hobby code, nothing professionally), where VCOMPRESSPS or VEXPANDPS would quickly and simply solve my problem. I personally would have never thought of making such an instruction, despite having written multiple sets of code that use a SIMD-compress or SIMD-expand pattern. ------- Case in point, vpcompressb (byte-wise compress) is the most blatantly obvious way to "remove redundant XML whitespace" that I've ever seen. Its just a thing that has obvious wide-spread applicability to many algorithms I've seen and keeps coming up again-and-again. Or determining which rays (in a raytracer) are "dead" vs "alive" (separating out hits vs misses). Or implementing quicksort (compress all items "less than pivot" to X array. Compress all items "greater than pivot" to a Y array. Quicksort done).
ncmncm 4y ago
I would like to know who this "hardware vendor, who were initially friendly and supportive but after evaluations of their technology went poorly became bullying and misleading" was, or anyway wasn't. A statement that it was not AMD would be meaningful. (We all know Qualcomm and Broadcom have their problems.)
- zymhan 4y ago
  "Hardware vendor" could also be a company like Dell or Cisco. It's not clear he's referencing a chip manufacturer
  - throwbigdata 4y ago
    Or Arista…
ryandotsmith 4y ago
Congrats! I've been following your career for as long as I can remember. You are a big inspiration and I'm excited to see what you do next.
subsubzero 4y ago
Huge, huge fan of Brendan's work, "Systems Performance" is one of the few technical books I've read cover to cover twice! That being said I wonder if why he left netflix was due to its stock price cratering, the timing does seem suspicious :)
- jedberg 4y ago
  No he didn't. He announced his departure the day before the stock cratered (some jokingly blamed the drop on his announcement).
  - progbits 4y ago
    As a person known for performance work there is no way he wasn't looking at various performance and usage charts and didn't know well ahead of the earnings call that their numbers are not looking good and stock will fall. Not saying the decision was caused by this. But he for sure is the "insider" that "insider trading" talks about.
    - jedberg 4y ago
      As a former insider myself, I can say that it was pretty hard to divine the earnings report from service metrics. We could see over-all patterns of ups or downs, but Wall Street mostly reacts to the future estimations as well as profitability, neither of which we could derive from metrics. And while we had access to active subscriber numbers, again how Wall Street reacted to a miss or not was not always predictable. Or in short, I doubt he could see this coming, especially given that his interview process had to start a few months ago.
- time_to_smile 4y ago
  > I wonder if why he left netflix was due to its stock price cratering My understanding (backed up by levels.fyi) is that RSUs make up a negligible part of Netflix total comp. The deal I always heard when talking with recruiters there was that base salary was very high ($500k) but they were pretty aggressive about maintaining a churn in their employees. But I never ended up accepting an offer there and it was awhile ago so hopefully some other Netflix employees can confirm whether or not RSUs are a major part of comp today.
Matthias247 4y ago
> One interviewer who had studied my work asked "How many staff report to you?" "None." He kept returning to this question. I got the feeling that he didn't actually believe it, and thought if he asked enough times I'd confess to having a team. My experience with this in interview loops is that it's less about admiring a persons technical abilities, but more a checkbox question to determine whether a person fits into a certain role model that companies have set up. At most FAANGs, interviews will expect that you mention you are being the tech lead of a team (5-10 engineers) at a (L|E)6 role, even if one isn't a manager. At (L|E)7, it will be 50+ engineers. As a regular engineer, one would probably have an issue getting hired at a high seniority level without answering the question the right way. Things might be different for well-known personalities like Brendan.
- JustLurking2022 4y ago
  Had this experience - worked in a role where I was mostly a very senior IC but also managed a small team for strategic projects. Interviewed at FAANG and got convinced that corresponded to an L6 sort of role, definitely should have held out for L7 though. Walk in the door to find that move of the L7s I've encountered have been leading 50 person teams (as manager or TL). Seems to range from more like 20-35 and, among ICs, there often not actually the only TL, just the most senior on the team.
- Spooky23 4y ago
  My team has hundreds of people, but a core team of about ~20 does most of cool stuff. It’s kind of a unique role. On interviews it sucks. The engineers assume I’m some jackass manager guy, and the manager guy thinks I’m in the weeds.
- seanmcdirmid 4y ago
  At the distinguished engineer level, you can get away with not being a tech lead. But ya, you'll have problems if you go from a very individual IC to a FAANG where they expect more leadership to have been demonstrated.
  - eikenberry 4y ago

397 points by ABS 4y ago

Completely OT: is anybody else bothered by the use of capitalization in email addresses? I understand that it doesn't matter semantically, but I find myself thinking negatively of people who use this for some reason.

userbinator 4y ago
Especially when it's Intel, the company which traditionally has a lowercase i in its logo. Also rather OT: The Intel l219 or I219 or i219 must be one of the worst names ever for a NIC. Even Intel doesn't seem to know whether that first letter is an uppercase I or a lowercase l.
jupp0r 4y ago
Yes, I do know that theoretically there could be different mailboxes on a server that do depend on capitalization, but this is not really happening in practice as far as I'm aware.
- niij 4y ago
  The RFC specifies that the local (left of the @) is treated as case sensitive[0] so it can have semantic meaning. In practice many hosted mail providers (Gmail, Yahoo, etc) treat their own accounts as case insensitive. But in MS Exchange, for example, you can have separate inboxes with only capitalization differences, so it's definitely not obscure. > local-part of a mailbox MUST BE treated as case sensitive. Therefore, SMTP implementations MUST take care to preserve the case of mailbox local-parts. In particular, for some hosts, the user "smith" is different from the user "Smith". 0: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5321#section-2.4 https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5321#section-2.4
  - singron 4y ago
    Google even lower cases emails when they are used for calendars, so you need to assume case insensitivity for that api to make sense.
  - jupp0r 4y ago
    Thanks, I didn't know about MS Exchange. I still haven't seen this happen in practice (ie differently capitalized emails not arriving, etc).
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

bluedino 4y ago

https://www.brendangregg.com/Images/brendan_clones2006.jpg https://www.brendangregg.com/Images/brendan_clones2006.jpg Is this some sort of training/demo room?

brendangregg 4y ago
Yes, a Sun Microsystems training room in Sydney. The entire building is now gone. I was teaching sysadmin and performance classes there in the early 2000s, for both internal and external staff.
stargrave 4y ago
More clones: https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2006-01-12/brendan-clones.html https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2006-01-12/brendan-clones....
- brendangregg 4y ago
  Thanks, I forgot where that one was.

loki49152 4y ago

Sun machines always seemed to have weird environment-dependent behavior. In college, one of our classmates got the nickname "the human eclipse" because no matter what time of day, no matter what else was going on, when he walked into the Sun lab the machines all went down.

alimov 4y ago

Hadn’t heard of BPF prior to today. Anyone have experience working with BPF? Has the recent (past 3 or so years) interest in BPF had a big impact?

johndfsgdgdfg 4y ago

Does the Netflix earning decline have anything to do with his departure? The timeline seems to match up.

jedberg 4y ago
He announced the day the stock dropped, so no, he was already out before that.

markus_zhang 4y ago

Didn't know Intel has a dev cloud till now!

alberth 4y ago

Clear Linux. I wonder if Brendan will directly contribute to Clear Linux. It's already the fastest Linux distro by many benchmarks. His software contribution to a distro that is focused on Intel proc would be really interesting.

kubatyszko 4y ago

Coincidence with Netflix resignations and/or layoffs ?

n7pdx 4y ago

Will give him less than two years. High level individual contributors like him are absolute poison to the Intel bureaucracy.

rektide 4y ago

This tale of super talented engineers having no one under them, being individual contributors, feels too common. Im sure Netflix had some idea how valuable, how much money Brendan was saving/making them, but I still would not be surprised to hear organization impedance was sometimes an issue.

rektide 4y ago
Interesting & telling (& not at all what i meant!) is most replies celebrating IC's. It's a simplifcation for sure but "autonomy, mastery, & purpose" being the elements of fulfilment rings true however hou dice this. Personally I'd really like to see a lot of really good engineers given direct unfettered access to talent, given authority while trying to minimize their personell and management overheads: let the humam resources go wild, synergize, make good things. And stand the frak back. It's a gaping vast culutral loss that Brendan hasnt had a team of 10 under him. There are people missing from the world who would be way awesome & have done great things if Brendan had simply been tossed some people. Byt usually corporations statt having political games, attachments, commitments, things other than the work itself that comes with authority. Im fascinated by & not sure this world will ever get to grapple with just how core & essential a problem creating "low-drag" organizations is. Allowing itself to acknowledge that much of what it does is far more excellent & powerful than those in the chain of command can really.tap, harvest, understand, much less take credit for or manage. Orgs need an anti-gravity force, a depolitical defence, of stand the f back. Brendan's go do it figure it out brilliance needs a chance & positiom in this world, needs to be shareable. Or the idea of an organization is actually a hazard, is ossified & unworthy of being the thing that has overgrown this planet loke it has. Human dignity & potential should not remain so shadowed & bound.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
birdyrooster 4y ago
Just keep heaping on the responsibility if they don't get burned out. Let's put these people to work. Better than me having to get off my ass.
4y ago

eatonphil 4y ago

> The title of this post is indeed my email address (I also used to be Brendan@Sun.com). The blog post title is "Brendan@Intel.com." HN formatting ruined a little bit of the fun of the blog post. :)

capableweb 4y ago
Too late by now, but "Brendan Inside" would have been an excellent title!
- pphysch 4y ago
  Tim Apple, Brendan Intel, who next?
  - addaon 4y ago
    Mike Rowe Soft?
    - anon_123g987 4y ago
      Uzi Nissan.
      - hasmanean 4y ago
        Nicholas Tesla.
loudmax 4y ago
In the blog post, Brendan Gregg confirms that that is indeed his actual email address at Intel. That's actually an impressive recognition of Brendan's capabilities. I wonder how many engineers at Intel have a <firstname>@intel.com email address.
- westwardly 4y ago
  25, across a wide range of job titles. Source: I am an engineer at Intel.

capableweb 4y ago

There was some speculation in the previous thread about brendangregg on where they're going next ((https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31051662 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31051662)). Not a single person seems to have gotten it right :) Caught me a bit by surprise as well, as Intel seems to have stagnated a bit as of late, but the opening paragraph seems to indicate Brendan thinks otherwise, and who am I to disagree. I wish you luck on the new adventures, and hope you'll have tons of fun!

MikePlacid 4y ago
>Caught me a bit by surprise as well, as Intel seems to have stagnated a bit as of late The best place for an engineer to be (in my observation) - is at a company that faces a fierce competition. To envision, design and build a pipe pumping gold vs to exploit such a pipe when it is built - requires different skills. >I recently worked with another hardware vendor, who were initially friendly and supportive but after evaluations of their technology went poorly became bullying and misleading. I wonder who this is.
alberth 4y ago
Apparently Brendan has known Intels CTO for a long time (they both worked at Sun together) https://mobile.twitter.com/GregL_Intel/status/1520789156024098817?cxt=HHwWgoCp8cHr9poqAAAA https://mobile.twitter.com/GregL_Intel/status/15207891560240...
neogodless 4y ago
Intel has a ton of product lines, and a sort of parallel business of design and production, which they've started to split apart. Their core CPU design has managed to stay relevant (and profitable) despite issues with production, and has regained some measure of success with their 12th generation. Their production business has a good roadmap, but success in execution remains to be proven. GPU design is a bit of a wildcard, and I'm excited to see if it pans out. I would say it's fair to say that what came out of Intel certainly felt stagnant as the past decade drug on, but there's still promise that they remain competitive.
- 4y ago

trishume 4y ago

I really hope he can work with cloud vendors and Intel to make Processor Trace a more popular and easier to use capability. It's unfortunate how https://github.com/janestreet/magic-trace https://github.com/janestreet/magic-trace and PMUs in general can't be used by lots of people using cloud VMs.

brendangregg 4y ago
Yes, getting PMCs enabled in VMs was just the start, I think the next hardware capabilities to enable are: - PEBS (Precise/Processor event based sampling, so that we can accurately get instruction pointers on PMC events) - uncore PMCs (in a safe manner) - LBR (last branch record, to aid stack walking) - BTS (branch trace store, " ") - Processor trace (for cycle traces) Processor trace may be the final boss. We've got through level 1, PMCs, now onto PEBS and beyond.
- sydthrowaway 4y ago
  One question: are you hiring?
- mhh__ 4y ago
  Can this be safely/efficiently virtualized? I love using these tools but post-spectre I could understand people being hesitant to expose more internal "state" (I.e. Technically unique to a VM but only one processor bug away from kaboom?). Congrats on the job.
  - dragontamer 4y ago
    On AMD systems, many hardware performance counters are locked behind BIOS flags/configuration. I admit that I don't know how Intel works, but disabling the use of these performance-counters at startup should be sufficient for any potential security problem. I'd expect that only development boxes (maybe staging?) would be interested in performance counters anyway. Maybe the occasional development box could be setup for performance-sampling and collecting these counters, but not all production boxes need to be run with performance-counters on.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago

> The geeks are back with Pat Gelsinger and Greg Lavender as the CEO and CTO; This is something I am so excited to hear about Intel. As a consumer and user, I want Intel/Apple/AMD/NVidia all to be competitive and pushing the boundaries of what is possible in computing. So far Apple has done an amazing job with M1. AMD has had super success with Ryzen. Nvidia has had great success with GPUs. Recently, it seemed Intel was lagging, in large part due to their culture. It is exciting to see them get some "geeks" back in charge. It is an exciting time in computing!

pavlov 4y ago
This! And I'd also add Qualcomm to the list of CPU companies that I hope to succeed. Qualcomm is designing desktop-level ARM chips to compete with Apple's M series. The team came from Apple via a startup acquisition (Nuvia). Will be interesting to see how that turns out.
User23 4y ago
I strongly agree. It's my belief that companies whose management team has direct operational experience will long term outperform the ones run by bean counters. I'm very bullish on Intel's future!
dboreham 4y ago
Exciting for me because I worked with Greg Lavender long ago and had totally missed his rise to ultimate power!

natly 4y ago

This guy left netflix at an incredibly lucky timing (wrt the stock price)

nicce 4y ago
Netflix is an incredibly profitable company still. Investment world is really a messed place, when infinite growth is expected from public companies.
- kolbe 4y ago
  For Netflix, I think the expectation used to be that they would establish themselves as a long-lasting company that would generate $20bn in profit per year. It's now looking dubious that they will exist in a meaningful way in a decade--that their value is now to milk the subscribers they have for all they're worth until they have no more.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
  Of the big tech companies, Netflix has the smallest most. Google has search. Apple has the iPhone. Microsoft has Windows and Office. Amazon has AWS and logistics. All of these are huge competitive moats. However, unlike when Netflix first started, the moat for streaming is not the tech it is the content. As such, Disney, Universal, etc which have decades worth of movies/shows have a huge advantage in this new reality where streaming can be implemented relatively easily.
  - conjecTech 4y ago
    Netflix's moat is the marginal unit economics of media. At present, they have twice the number of subscribers of the nearest competitor(Disney), and that ratio is probably far higher in non-US markets. They can outbid everyone for content and still deliver a service at a lower COGS than anyone else in the market. They still have to produce a high volume of good content, but it allows them far more mistakes in doing so. It also allows them to make content tailored to niches which aren't economic for others.

titzer 4y ago

Good luck Brendan! One project that I would find really interesting would be to leverage the insane capabilities of GPUs and 3d graphics to make extremely detailed visualizations of millions and billions of performance events, intervals, code paths, data structures, heat maps, and the like. It'd be great to get views beyond the raw data that are not oversimplified and useless, but rather to get the feeling of being at the helm of some seriously detailed (and precise!) data with zoomable resolution and a lot of assistance of analyzers to surface visual artifacts. I think it'd be both entertaining and highly productive to engage our visual cortex more.

throw0101a 4y ago

He's come a long way since yelling at hard drives in Sun's data centre: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4 * https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2008-12-31/unusual-disk-latency.html https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2008-12-31/unusual-disk-la...

ignoramous 4y ago
> My dream is to turn computer performance analysis into a science, one where we can completely understand the performance of everything: of applications, libraries, kernels, hypervisors, firmware, and hardware. Reminds me of Bret Victor's Inventing on Principle (2012), https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/PUv66718DII https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/PUv66718DII
perch56 4y ago
Forgot about the video and didn’t realize it’s the same person. Also reminded me of this 2016 incident that happened in an ING data center https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-37337868.amp https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-37337868.amp
- teddyh 4y ago
  Fire suppression systems are no joke: https://www.sanitarium.net/jokes/getjoke.cgi?183 https://www.sanitarium.net/jokes/getjoke.cgi?183
hobo_mark 4y ago
That's him?!? That was thirteen years ago?!? I have to sit down for a minute...
orangepanda 4y ago
I wonder for how long they were debugging the performance issue, when screaming at a server rack seemed a worthwhile idea
maxmcd 4y ago
A video posted by Bryan Cantrill no less.

tedd4u 4y ago

Was hoping he would end up somewhere working on accelerating ARM in cloud platforms. But Intel is good, too :D

dragontamer 4y ago

I've followed a lot of Brendan's low-level talks and blogposts, and have always enjoyed them. Good luck at Intel! They do seem like a group that would be interested in the low-level optimization expertise Brendan clearly has!

mrlonglong 4y ago

Sort out the AVX-512 débâcle and maybe adopt some form of the insanely cool vector instructions arm64 uses for a start ...

dragontamer 4y ago
> insanely cool vector instructions arm64 Which ones would those be? SVE is somewhat interesting, but I've generally found the AVX512 instructions more innovative. I really like AVX512's "compress" and "expand" instructions, for example... as well as the classic "vpermb" (but vector-permutation has been around since SSE and is an old trick: the old pshufb instruction). Since SVE doesn't want to "set" its SIMD-width, it seems like these permute instructions (vpermb, or even compress/expand) aren't possible? ------- I've always enjoyed Intel's innovative new instructions: PEXT, PDEP, and now AVX512 compress and AVX512 expand. AVX512 also includes gather/scatter (but that's not innovative, been around for a long time but still nice to see it in prosumer systems)
- astrange 4y ago
  SVE is interesting but I'm surprised it actually works. A vector instruction set where you can change the vector width sounds like the classic CISC instruction that ends up unusably slow because it's microcoded. And yet ARM has it and x86 doesn't? Also, it's an implementation choice to let you set SVE widths that aren't a power of two?
- mochomocha 4y ago
  Can you expand on why you find AVX512 instructions more innovative? I haven't had a chance to try SVE yet, but on paper it sounds very innovative and offers a wide range of new capabilities. Gather/scatter have been around for a while, but it hasn't been until more recent Intel uarch that their cost makes them worth using in practice. Zen3 is still lagging quite a bit.
  - dragontamer 4y ago
    I've seen real-life situations in the past 5 years (albeit with my personal hobby code, nothing professionally), where VCOMPRESSPS or VEXPANDPS would quickly and simply solve my problem. I personally would have never thought of making such an instruction, despite having written multiple sets of code that use a SIMD-compress or SIMD-expand pattern. ------- Case in point, vpcompressb (byte-wise compress) is the most blatantly obvious way to "remove redundant XML whitespace" that I've ever seen. Its just a thing that has obvious wide-spread applicability to many algorithms I've seen and keeps coming up again-and-again. Or determining which rays (in a raytracer) are "dead" vs "alive" (separating out hits vs misses). Or implementing quicksort (compress all items "less than pivot" to X array. Compress all items "greater than pivot" to a Y array. Quicksort done).

ncmncm 4y ago

I would like to know who this "hardware vendor, who were initially friendly and supportive but after evaluations of their technology went poorly became bullying and misleading" was, or anyway wasn't. A statement that it was not AMD would be meaningful. (We all know Qualcomm and Broadcom have their problems.)

zymhan 4y ago
"Hardware vendor" could also be a company like Dell or Cisco. It's not clear he's referencing a chip manufacturer
- throwbigdata 4y ago
  Or Arista…

ryandotsmith 4y ago

Congrats! I've been following your career for as long as I can remember. You are a big inspiration and I'm excited to see what you do next.

subsubzero 4y ago

Huge, huge fan of Brendan's work, "Systems Performance" is one of the few technical books I've read cover to cover twice! That being said I wonder if why he left netflix was due to its stock price cratering, the timing does seem suspicious :)

jedberg 4y ago
No he didn't. He announced his departure the day before the stock cratered (some jokingly blamed the drop on his announcement).
- progbits 4y ago
  As a person known for performance work there is no way he wasn't looking at various performance and usage charts and didn't know well ahead of the earnings call that their numbers are not looking good and stock will fall. Not saying the decision was caused by this. But he for sure is the "insider" that "insider trading" talks about.
  - jedberg 4y ago
    As a former insider myself, I can say that it was pretty hard to divine the earnings report from service metrics. We could see over-all patterns of ups or downs, but Wall Street mostly reacts to the future estimations as well as profitability, neither of which we could derive from metrics. And while we had access to active subscriber numbers, again how Wall Street reacted to a miss or not was not always predictable. Or in short, I doubt he could see this coming, especially given that his interview process had to start a few months ago.
time_to_smile 4y ago
> I wonder if why he left netflix was due to its stock price cratering My understanding (backed up by levels.fyi) is that RSUs make up a negligible part of Netflix total comp. The deal I always heard when talking with recruiters there was that base salary was very high ($500k) but they were pretty aggressive about maintaining a churn in their employees. But I never ended up accepting an offer there and it was awhile ago so hopefully some other Netflix employees can confirm whether or not RSUs are a major part of comp today.

Matthias247 4y ago

> One interviewer who had studied my work asked "How many staff report to you?" "None." He kept returning to this question. I got the feeling that he didn't actually believe it, and thought if he asked enough times I'd confess to having a team. My experience with this in interview loops is that it's less about admiring a persons technical abilities, but more a checkbox question to determine whether a person fits into a certain role model that companies have set up. At most FAANGs, interviews will expect that you mention you are being the tech lead of a team (5-10 engineers) at a (L|E)6 role, even if one isn't a manager. At (L|E)7, it will be 50+ engineers. As a regular engineer, one would probably have an issue getting hired at a high seniority level without answering the question the right way. Things might be different for well-known personalities like Brendan.

JustLurking2022 4y ago
Had this experience - worked in a role where I was mostly a very senior IC but also managed a small team for strategic projects. Interviewed at FAANG and got convinced that corresponded to an L6 sort of role, definitely should have held out for L7 though. Walk in the door to find that move of the L7s I've encountered have been leading 50 person teams (as manager or TL). Seems to range from more like 20-35 and, among ICs, there often not actually the only TL, just the most senior on the team.
Spooky23 4y ago
My team has hundreds of people, but a core team of about ~20 does most of cool stuff. It’s kind of a unique role. On interviews it sucks. The engineers assume I’m some jackass manager guy, and the manager guy thinks I’m in the weeds.
seanmcdirmid 4y ago
At the distinguished engineer level, you can get away with not being a tech lead. But ya, you'll have problems if you go from a very individual IC to a FAANG where they expect more leadership to have been demonstrated.
- eikenberry 4y ago