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> he made the fucking Zen architecture From Jim himself: > IC: A few people consider you 'The Father of Zen', do you think you’d scribe to that position? Or s

by scrlk 4y ago

> he made the fucking Zen architecture From Jim himself: > 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. 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-...

comboy 4y ago
Well yes, this is exactly why I say he is wise. And also surprisingly humble. But if you listen to the whole story, how the architecture came to be, scratching reasons not to do it one by one etc., the picture seems pretty clear.
- highwaylights 4y ago
  I’d be inclined to take the man at his word humility or not. If he says it was a team effort, especially if he’s speaking clearly about the different aspects and who was responsible for them, I wouldn’t disagree with him. He would know after all.
  - Hikikomori 4y ago
    Keller was also mainly hired to work on K12 ARM.
  - nindalf 4y ago
    There are few human endeavours that aren’t team efforts. Even if we aren’t collaborating day to day, we still stand on the shoulders of giants all the time.
  - darksaints 4y ago
    I would too, but this shows something to me with respect to his ability to launch a new fab: he knows what it takes to build and work with a team of teams, all with specialist knowledge. That’s something far more important than his ability to do everything himself, which is completely irrelevant at this scale.
jacquesm 4y ago
That's very classy, humble and will go a very long way to get your team mates to want to work with you again in the future.
- scns 4y ago
  When Michael Schumacher won the race and became Formula One Champion, they asked him over radio how he feels. His response: "We did it, Ross you are the best!" Archetypically speaking, his and Kellers' behaviour shows they embody the good king.
  - esperent 4y ago
    Or maybe the other people involved are really, genuinely, just as important as him and there's no king, there's a team. Its human nature to pick out heros, say they did everything by themselves and idolize them. That doesn't mean it's real. It's just a story you're telling yourself. I've never heard about the people mentioned here, and I don't know anything about semiconductor manufacturing. Except that it's one of the absolute most complicated things humans have ever attempted and there's no way a single person could be the creator of an entire modern processor architecture. So I've been reading through this thread kind of surprised to see people saying this one person did so. But your comment made me realize it's just typical hero worship. Note: this doesn't belittle the work of anyone. Schumacher is an amazing driver, one of the best in the world. But saying he is responsible for winning formula one races belittles the work of the other people involved, engineers at the top of their game just as much as he is, and yet faceless to most people. He could be exactly the driver he is, or even a hundred times better, and without equally talented engineers behind him he'd still finish in last place. So did he win the races, or did they? Obviously, the answer is that they won together.
    - jkhdigital 4y ago
      I think the point being made above is that good leaders consistently and forcefully resist the invitation to take personal credit for accomplishments that is inevitably and repeatedly thrust upon them by the public eye.
KingOfCoders 4y ago
Can someone add something to " the Arm front end "?
- Keyframe 4y ago
  I'm interested to hear about this as well. I might be confabulating a bit, but just a bit, but I remember hearing Keller say that Zen is structured that way that there's nothing stopping them creating a different ISA frontend and say putting out an Arm processor instead of X64. That it actually wouldn't be much.
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    My guess was that that was a reference to the PSP. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Platform_Security_Processor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Platform_Security_Processo...
    - Keyframe 4y ago
      So, AMD's IME?
      - jacquesm 4y ago
        Yes, exactly. Assuming that was what it referred to, it makes good sense to me.
    - deaddodo 4y ago
      No, AMD’s Zen had a sister uArch that was ARM-based[1]. They were originally targeting it for servers, but ended up releasing only one or two fairly bog standard ARM cores before abandoning the venture. 1 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_K12 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_K12
      - jacquesm 4y ago
        You're right. I read the anandtech interview and it is clear that that is what he's referring to.
paulmd 4y ago
Check out this interview with the actual architect of Zen, Mike Clark. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vyNzgOP5yw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vyNzgOP5yw Probably the most interesting nugget is that Zen2 was actually considered a tweak internally and not a full uarch revision, while Zen3 is actually the clean-sheet revision. But it's just a good summary of the general tone and tempo of CPU development I think.

by scrlk 4y ago

comboy 4y ago

Well yes, this is exactly why I say he is wise. And also surprisingly humble. But if you listen to the whole story, how the architecture came to be, scratching reasons not to do it one by one etc., the picture seems pretty clear.

highwaylights 4y ago
I’d be inclined to take the man at his word humility or not. If he says it was a team effort, especially if he’s speaking clearly about the different aspects and who was responsible for them, I wouldn’t disagree with him. He would know after all.
- Hikikomori 4y ago
  Keller was also mainly hired to work on K12 ARM.
- nindalf 4y ago
  There are few human endeavours that aren’t team efforts. Even if we aren’t collaborating day to day, we still stand on the shoulders of giants all the time.
- darksaints 4y ago
  I would too, but this shows something to me with respect to his ability to launch a new fab: he knows what it takes to build and work with a team of teams, all with specialist knowledge. That’s something far more important than his ability to do everything himself, which is completely irrelevant at this scale.

jacquesm 4y ago

That's very classy, humble and will go a very long way to get your team mates to want to work with you again in the future.

scns 4y ago
When Michael Schumacher won the race and became Formula One Champion, they asked him over radio how he feels. His response: "We did it, Ross you are the best!" Archetypically speaking, his and Kellers' behaviour shows they embody the good king.
- esperent 4y ago
  Or maybe the other people involved are really, genuinely, just as important as him and there's no king, there's a team. Its human nature to pick out heros, say they did everything by themselves and idolize them. That doesn't mean it's real. It's just a story you're telling yourself. I've never heard about the people mentioned here, and I don't know anything about semiconductor manufacturing. Except that it's one of the absolute most complicated things humans have ever attempted and there's no way a single person could be the creator of an entire modern processor architecture. So I've been reading through this thread kind of surprised to see people saying this one person did so. But your comment made me realize it's just typical hero worship. Note: this doesn't belittle the work of anyone. Schumacher is an amazing driver, one of the best in the world. But saying he is responsible for winning formula one races belittles the work of the other people involved, engineers at the top of their game just as much as he is, and yet faceless to most people. He could be exactly the driver he is, or even a hundred times better, and without equally talented engineers behind him he'd still finish in last place. So did he win the races, or did they? Obviously, the answer is that they won together.
  - jkhdigital 4y ago
    I think the point being made above is that good leaders consistently and forcefully resist the invitation to take personal credit for accomplishments that is inevitably and repeatedly thrust upon them by the public eye.

KingOfCoders 4y ago

Can someone add something to " the Arm front end "?

Keyframe 4y ago
I'm interested to hear about this as well. I might be confabulating a bit, but just a bit, but I remember hearing Keller say that Zen is structured that way that there's nothing stopping them creating a different ISA frontend and say putting out an Arm processor instead of X64. That it actually wouldn't be much.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  My guess was that that was a reference to the PSP. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Platform_Security_Processor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Platform_Security_Processo...
  - Keyframe 4y ago
    So, AMD's IME?
    - jacquesm 4y ago
      Yes, exactly. Assuming that was what it referred to, it makes good sense to me.
  - deaddodo 4y ago
    No, AMD’s Zen had a sister uArch that was ARM-based[1]. They were originally targeting it for servers, but ended up releasing only one or two fairly bog standard ARM cores before abandoning the venture. 1 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_K12 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_K12
    - jacquesm 4y ago
      You're right. I read the anandtech interview and it is clear that that is what he's referring to.

paulmd 4y ago

Check out this interview with the actual architect of Zen, Mike Clark. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vyNzgOP5yw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vyNzgOP5yw Probably the most interesting nugget is that Zen2 was actually considered a tweak internally and not a full uarch revision, while Zen3 is actually the clean-sheet revision. But it's just a good summary of the general tone and tempo of CPU development I think.