I really liked that quote. It's a great talk indeed.
Keller says a lot of interesting things in this interview that aren't followed up on. He calls for more substantial changes and architectural changes, I wonder what he thinks of spatial architectures.
The video goes from something that 100,000 people with a computer architecture background might watch to something that 10,000,000 people with a tech background might watch.
That said, I haven't listened to him much, and he just grated me wrong here.
How do you tradeoff with learning and “doing” i.e writing code or putting what you have learnt into practice?
I can’t finish a technical book without getting the urge to implement
It's pretty funny for the interviewer to say "agree to disagree" or "well, no" when he's clearly not the expert of the two.
“Keller’s departure is a big deal and suggests that whatever he was implementing at Intel was not working or the old Intel guard did not want to implement it,” Hans Mosesmann, an analyst at Rosenblatt Securities, wrote in a note to investors. “The net of this situation for us is that Intel’s processor and process node roadmaps are going to be more in flux or broken than even we had expected.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIG9ztQw2Gc
And another
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eT1jaHmlx8
And another
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qnl7--MvNAM
DEC, PA Semi, Apple, AMD, Tesla, Intel. He's been everywhere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Keller_(engineer)
The internal announcement memo:
https://wccftech.com/exclusive-intel-internal-memo-jim-kelle...
It's such a pity the interviewer didn't prepare more technical questions that touch on the new architectures, compilers, cache, TPUs and his design experience. I only care about him asking good questions.
Jim equally seems incredibly engaged and patient with the questions sometime moving the game to a lot higher level than at which the question was posed. Without breaking a sweat.
Intel's struggle has nothing to do with is processors' design. Sunny Cove and Willow Cove ( aka Icelake and TigerLake ) were close to design complete before Jim Keller joined. Intel's problem is with their manufacturing, both technical and economical. And Jim Keller is not a Fab guy, nothing he could do to fix this.
There's a video on AdoredTV about the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agxSclh27uo
No - I think he'll go to Nvidia, because he hasn't been there before, hasn't really worked on GPU's before, and because I think GPU's could gain a lot of performance by having someone look at optimizing the big picture, adding the right abstraction layers, and generally making a GPU more CPU-like to allow more execution to be moved to it more easily.
Intel has a culture which isn't exactly amenable to working flexibly, or to someone coming in and making lots of changes to the culture itself.
(tongue in cheek)
In situations where I have seen that in the past, the person was caught in grievously bad, unambiguous case of sexual harassment, racism or something equally socially despised.
If this is not the case, Intel's PR people are doing a serious disservice to Keller in the way the announcement has been structured.
Generally if a higher level executive resigns due to actual "personal reasons" or a family tragedy, and it's an amicable departure, it's announced with at least a few weeks notice.
> Intel is pleased to announce, however, that Mr. Keller has agreed to serve as a consultant for six months to assist with the transition.
For this kind of person, Intel gains a lot simply having his name associated with the company, so would have no qualms giving him years to travel the world on a yacht if he wanted to.
I think it really means "Intel didn't fire me, but I don't want to say any more".
Here's to hoping that in the 2 years Keller had been in Intel, he had left many good, realizable ideas on how to overhaul Intel's CPU architecture. If not, then this news might be the death knell for Intel's CPU might for the next decade.
He was a comp-architecture guy counting on the device/physics folks to deliver. They didn't, while Jim put his reputation on the line. He probably resigned in disappointment and/or protest.
- Moore's law is dead at the physics level.
- Exponential tech progress doesn't stop but it won't be in the form of Si FETs, at least not in the foreseeable future.
- There is plenty of opportunity at the higher layers of abstraction though.
- Fortunately the AGI problem has escaped Moore's law (AGI can happen with existing node technology). And in my opinion that's all that matters for the next 10 years.
(Of all the naysayers who I've come across in the past many years, if a tenth of them were willing to fund me to work on AGI, by now I'd be well on my way to prove them wrong. But therein lies the rub. Why would they spend money on being proven wrong?)
