Jim Keller to Depart Intel

He's been at Apple before. Doubt he'll go back to a place he's been before unless he thinks the landscape has changed enough he can have a really big impact again. I don't think thats the case at Apple.

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.

Nothing stops Intel manufacturing their designs with third parties. Yet they don't.

Either it isn't worth it (too much coupling between fab and designs - not the right abstractions), or institutional inertia stops them doing it.

That's fair, I think you're right.

Selfishly, though, as someone who doesn't work at Intel/nvidia/AMD but is interested in architecture and digital design, it's frustrating how hard it is to find candid opinions from industry experts in comparison to software. Computer architecture just isn't the same in terms of attitude.

One of my favorite things about the computer architecture courses I took was to sit after class and ask my professors about something I'd read about, and more often than not they'd tell me that what I read was bullshit and nobody seriously considered it in the industry, or they'd tell me about something they were excited about that I hadn't heard of. It's hard to get a handle on where the industry is heading and what important people see as the next steps to iterate on.

A general conversation is probably more useful to most people, but there are a lot of times in this conversation where you get the feeling that Keller is right on the precipice of giving an insider prediction of the future, and the topic shifts instead. It's frustrating because those types of conversations are just straight-up difficult to find elsewhere.

It's so funny to hear the interviewer explaining to Jim what he understands. All this happening after in the first part of the interview he couldn't compute the answer Jim gave when explaining predicting branches. Also he's in no position to push back on ideas. As if I really care what the interviewer care or not.

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.

> Nothing stops Intel manufacturing their designs with third parties. Yet they don't.

It wouldn't surprise me if the reason Keller left is because he wanted to outsource manufacturing to a competitive third party fab, and got denied.

Keller is an a computer architect, but architecture doesn't matter if you can't physically build the thing.