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Jim Keller? IC: A few people consider you 'The Father of Zen', do you think you’d scribe to that position? Or should that go to somebody else? JK: Perhaps one
by tester756 4y ago
Jim Keller?
IC: A few people consider you 'The Father of Zen', do you think you’d scribe to that position? Or should that go to somebody else?
JK: Perhaps one of the uncles. There were a lot of really great people on Zen. There was a methodology team that was worldwide, the SoC team was partly in Austin and partly in India, the floating-point cache was done in Colorado, the core execution front end was in Austin, the Arm front end was in Sunnyvale, and we had good technical leaders. I was in daily communication for a while with Suzanne Plummer and Steve Hale, who kind of built the front end of the Zen core, and the Colorado team. It was really good people. Mike Clark's a great architect, so we had a lot of fun, and success. Success has a lot of authors - failure has one. So that was a success. Then some teams stepped up - we moved Excavator to the Boston team, where they took over finishing the design and the physical stuff, Harry Fair and his guys did a great job on that. So there were some fairly stressful organizational changes that we did, going through that. The team all came together, so I think there was a lot of camaraderie in it. So I won't claim to be the ‘father’ - I was brought in, you know, as the instigator and the chief nudge, but part architect part transformational leader. That was fun.
- anon_123g987 4y agoThis is from an AnandTech interview with Jim Keller: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16762/an-anandtech-interview-with-jim-keller-laziest-person-at-tesla https://www.anandtech.com/show/16762/an-anandtech-interview-...
- ncmncm 4y agoThe whole interview was deeply inspiring. There is a very great deal to be learned from studying it. Listen carefully, and more than once! The audio is probably better than the text, at least first time through.
- ipython 4y agoI don’t know the truth but that was spoken like a true humble leader. If I was forced to draw conclusions just based on that one exchange, I would agree that Jim Keller was an instrumental part of the successful design and implementation of the zen microarchitecture.
- baybal2 4y ago
- buildbot 4y agoI love the ARM frontend casually thrown in there, I wonder if that project is back on the table these days.
- beebeepka 4y agoI feel the project was put on hold purely for business reasons, as in there's still a lot of money to be made on x86.
- qzw 4y agoThat and Microsoft has had an exclusivity agreement with Qualcomm for Windows on ARM. Once that agreement expires, I expect AMD to suddenly have some very interesting offerings.
- Manouchehri 4y agoThe AMD PSP is already an ARM chip in your amd64 CPU.
- snek_case 4y agoWait, floating-point cache? Does it cache FP operation results? Where can I read more about this?
- ncmncm 4y agoProbably inner-loop op sequences.