81–90 of 94 posts
Jim is a tour de force: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nb2tebYAaOA
Lex has a PhD in machine learning but doesn't seem to be familiar with branch prediction, apparently.
I often find it hard to believe that a single person can make much of a difference in such intricate problem domains as chip design but in his case the evidence is overwhelming. Also goes to show what a shit show Intel has become since even he was not able to right that ship. I think in the CPU space it will be all ARM and RISC ten years from now and since Intel never really managed to become a dominant player in any…
Novel development in a complex problem space isn't something one can just throw manpower at and expect progress. I'm sure that a certain amount of his fame is due to being a famous architect, as name recognition always compounds. There's no way he's more influential than the rest of the industry combined (shoulders of giants and whatnot), but I would be hard pressed to find press recognition of other hardware enginee…
I often find it hard to believe that a single person can make much of a difference in such intricate problem domains as chip design but in his case the evidence is overwhelming. Also goes to show what a shit show Intel has become since even he was not able to right that ship. I think in the CPU space it will be all ARM and RISC ten years from now and since Intel never really managed to become a dominant player in any…
The person can be a key motivator to bring the team forward, or reach decisions they wouldn't otherwise have taken.
Jim is a tour de force: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nb2tebYAaOA
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of the tendencies of shrinking companies is exacerbated executive infighting. If the company is growing, there are new X-of-Y positions to move up to. If the company is stable or shrinking, people start watching out for their own careers with knives out. AMD possibly avoided this because of size & realization of what needed to be done. Intel's too big & old: I would be very surprised if they weren't much more int…
This is an absolutely on-point observation about company dynamics that a large number of people in the tech industry have never had to experience. It's why growth is so critical.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>one insane instruction set extension after another You're probably going to see a whole lot more of this sort of thing given the limits to process scaling. Keeping things simple and backwardly compatible made sense when you could just throw more transistors at the problem. Now you're seeing more and more specialized circuitry that software people are just going to have to deal with.
I am not against a new instruction. At first blush the new JavaScript instruction in arm might seem like a boondoggle but it is a simple arithmetic operation. Compare that to the non-scalable SIMD instructions that mean you have to rewrite your code to take advantage of them and resultingly people don't bother to use them at all. AMX allocates a huge die area to GEMM functionality that gets used a lot less in real nu…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thank you. This is definitely one of the best interviews I have read. The precision of the statements and the usage of analogies to explain the topics is astonishing.
Is there a transcript of it?
Jim is a tour de force: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nb2tebYAaOA
I wish the interviewer was more technical. He doesn't do interviews very often. Lex has a PhD in machine learning but doesn't seem to be familiar with branch prediction, apparently.
I mean, I have a PhD and had no idea what branch prediction was until I listened to that podcast.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't know why Reuters was posted over this.
I think it's a timing thing. There was an earlier post with the Anandtech article late yesterday, but because so much of HN is in NA timezones it was likely smothered by the morning. Love the TechTechPotato breakdown of this BTW :)