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Jim Keller and his pioneering work on chip design and architecture
- teddyX 3y agoThis sounds like something Elon musk would do to Tesla just to save $8 on parts
- panick21_ 3y ago> just to save $8 on parts I don't think you understand what $8 per vehicle represents in cost savings. $8 in parts can literally be 10s of million in savings per year. And then you are basically tied to this supplier forever as switching something so fundamental isn't easy. In automotive, using less screws to save 50c on each vehicle is considered a big win.
- cranium 3y agoAt this kind of scale, finding a "small" saving may pay for tens of engineer years and justify hiring people just for that. Same thing to optimize cloud costs.
- jakeinspace 3y agoSure, but Tesla doesn’t sell that many vehicles. They only went over a million last year (will be closer to 2 million this year it would appear.
- justinclift 3y agoSo, US$8M per million vehicles. That's at least a few engineers salaries. ;)
- panick21_ 3y agoYes, they were planning ahead. They knew they would sell more vehicles in the future, and thus the effort was worth it. Not just for V1, but the following version as well. Once you have an internal team, you can vertically integrate and costume the solution to your needs exactly rather then buying a generic part from a supplier. Things like OTA updates are just easier if you control the software and hardware stack yourself. And once you have a team with expertise you can use them for other projects as well, like Dojo.
- helf 3y ago[dead]
- RealityVoid 3y agoSome design decisions are also really not obvious. I've seen engineering decisions of the kind... We'll put another microcontroller because we would need less wiring between these 2 boards and the wiring would be more expensive. A clever one I saw was where they milled a PCB thinner in a section to make it bendy and did not need 2 boards because of this.
- justinclift 3y agoSounds like that'd have reliability concerns in an environment where the whole thing can receive substantial shocks (the physical kind) over time.
- ethbr0 3y agoOnly if there's motion. Something can be bent and also secured.
- bch 3y agoEnvironment dependent as to whether this is a consideration at all, but still a potential stress riser.
- RealityVoid 3y agoThe whole assembly was potted, encased in resin.
- _0ffh 3y agoCan confirm. Most people probably wouldn't believe the effort that is spent on improving the physical engine models in the ECUs in order to save a few bucks on sensors. Precisely, as you wrote, because those few bucks multiply while a software effort is one-time.
- mensetmanusman 3y agoOne FTE saving $0.05 per vehicle pays for their salary.
- dtgriscom 3y agoI remember in the mid '70s looking under the hood of my family's enormous station wagon and being greeted by a solid surface of hoses and valves, all dedicated to meeting the recently-boosted emissions standards. Open an internal-combustion hood now, and it's much, much simpler.
- mikhailfranco 3y agoI recommend Keller's appearances on the Lex Fridman podcast, and also the chat with his (Keller's) brother-in-law Jordan Peterson.
- beebmam 3y agoI found that Lex interview enlightening for two reasons. Firstly, Keller is a profoundly talented and interesting guy. And secondly, Lex is a truly painful and incompetent interviewer; virtually every time Lex spoke I begged my screen for him to stay quiet and let Keller speak.
- djmips 3y agoYou need an interviewer. Lex isn't that terrible.
- hebrox 3y agoI had the same feeling with a lot of interviews from the past, but somehow, about a year ago, something changed. Not sure if it was a conscious decision or just the result of so much practice, but for quite something I haven’t screamed at my screen when listening to Lex.
- mips_r4300i 3y agoI've noticed that as well. He frequently also gets distracted thinking about taking ideas to such an abstract level they don't really make sense any longer, he looks off at the ceiling somewhere, and then the guest continues off as if they didn't see that. It makes me crack up every time, hah. This is in contrast to many other podcasters who stay engrossed in surface level details and never graduate to thinking about overarching concepts. Lex just zooms there too fast sometimes.
- localplume 3y ago[dead]
- comboy 3y ago
- cloudengineer94 3y agoThe man is a legend! He made an amazing go work across Apple, AMD and recently at Intel.
- PartiallyTyped 3y agoHe also did amazing work at Intel before AMD iirc. Jim Keller is really up there.
- KeyBoardG 3y agoAlso at Tesla. He got really started at DEC on the Alpha processor, which was also world class and surrounded by industry pioneers.
- majso 3y agoHe is currently working on RISC-V chip: https://wccftech.com/jim-keller-tenstorrent-wants-to-compete-with-nvidia-ai-gpus-using-risc-v-based-ai-cpus/ https://wccftech.com/jim-keller-tenstorrent-wants-to-compete...
- faichai 3y ago> that eventually disrupted the market leadership of Intel’s 64-bit Itanium chips Erm, Itanium never had any kind of market leadership. It was a failure.
- nordsieck 3y ago> Erm, Itanium never had any kind of market leadership. It was a failure. That's true. But part of the reason Itanium as a failure is because AMD came out with x86-64, which was so successful that Intel ended up being forced to adopt it (it didn't help that the first generation of Itanium chips was... underwhelming).
- Sakos 3y agoI think the general consensus is that AMD could only swoop in as it did because Itanium was such a disaster of epic proportions, both technically and on a management level. There was no way Itanium was ever going to be successful. x86-64 was just the final nail in the coffin.
- faitswulff 3y agoHow was Keller able to pull off so much impactful work over so many organizations? i.e. what proportion of his impact was attributable to novel ideas, solo engineering implementation ability, engineering leadership, or just darn good timing?
- trustingtrust 3y agoYou should see his interviews with Dr. Ian Cutress. The man basically knows everything in the industry in and out and knows how to create great teams. I want to interview for Tenstorrent at some point and would love to work for him. I feel being part of great teams is what he has been fortunate with. People very easily forget the rest of the team in chip design and make it about one person. I feel he's a true leader in chip design teams, but I also think he has worked with many great people to achieve that.
- atonse 3y agoPeople like this are extremely rare and talented, AND they are able to build amazing teams. Other super talented people want to work with a Jim Keller. So a company hires a Jim Keller not just because you want his brain, but because you can then go to the next 20 amazing people in the industry and say "come work on Jim Keller's team" – now you have 20 min Jim Kellers on your team and that is enough to move mountains in an extremely specialized field such as chip design.
- belval 3y agoThe cult of personality is always an enticing idea, it's pretty much certain that Jim Keller had a stellar team to work with in all of those places. That being said, even a strong team is still usually only as good as its leadership. You can have all the great ideas in the world, but if the organisation does not allow you to pursue them (or on the other extreme, allows everyone to work on what they think is best) you will still fail to execute. At the end of the day you need someone to make the correct decisions every step of the way.
- toast0 3y ago
- varelse 3y ago[dead]
- belval 3y agoTo address the article, this will be very interesting because in the market Tensortorrent is targetting the real challenge is software support for PyTorch, TensorFlow, distributed training, etc... and less about the hardware itself. It's not like AMD GPUs can't do matrix multiplications at competitive TFLOPS but instead that if I wanted to use them to run a model I'd have to work through several workarounds to get similar performance to an Nvidia GPU that is mostly plug-and-play. We will see if Jim Keller's many talents include managing software.
- cma 3y agoDoes AMD have similar tensor core stuff?
- kimixa 3y agoThey now have Xilinx's AI cores since they merged (acquired?). https://www.xilinx.com/products/technology/ai-engine.html https://www.xilinx.com/products/technology/ai-engine.html seems to be a high-level overview. I think their latest APUs for laptops have this IP integrated. And they're blurring the line by adding more AI-focused acceleration instructions to their GPUs (maybe focused on their CDNA line rather than the consumer RDNA, but they're expanding their capabilities on both). There seems to be a bit of a philosophy difference between NVidia and AMD acceleration - NVidia add new specialised "cores", while AMD adds those similar capabilities as accelerated instructions to their shader units. Though this might just be marketing - I don't think we've got an open reference for the NVidia shader ISA like we do with AMD so difficult to compare, but the capabilities and integration in shaders of many of these acceleration paths seems to imply they might also be implemented as shader instructions, which stretches the definition of a separate "core" to me, and so might just be a marketing difference rather than anything technical. Same with things like the BVH acceleration used in ray tracing - AMD added shader instructions, while NVidia talks loudly about "RT Cores".
- belval 3y agoYes that's my point. AMD has the hardware, but using that hardware with the existing DL ecosystem is much more painful and they haven't been able to bridge that gap.