And...back to AMD?
It says "for personal reasons," which is not text I would expect if he was just going to another company.
I've personally known people who leave with that line and surface at a new company shortly thereafter.
Jim Keller to Depart Intel
71–80 of 113 posts
Re: Jim Keller to Depart Intel
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also, he's agreed to stay on as a consultant for the next six months, which I assume is not something you'd do if you were planning on working for a competitor at the same time.
6 months is not an atypical non-compete clause length.
I obviously haven't seen his contract but it would surprise me if the noncompete clock started before his final day as a consultant. If it did, that would sort of eliminate the value of having a noncompete in the first place, wouldn't it?
Re: Jim Keller to Depart Intel
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Intel's problem is that they fired expensive, older American workers and replaced them with H1B contractors. There's a video on AdoredTV about the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agxSclh27uo
Keeping up with the mood of the country (US) I want to call these comments out as racist propaganda. The casual reference to H1B workers(90% Indians) as root cause of problems in American tech companies is getting old.
As someone who used to hold an H-1B visa I can confirm that they are one of the dominant factors that brought Silicon Valley to where it is today. Workers on H-1B visas are fearful and obedient. Despotic managers who love to cut corners without being held to account thrive on such a workforce.
Re: Jim Keller to Depart Intel
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
They have been working on the 10nm manufacturing process for ages and it's still not completely finished. That gave AMD huge opportunity to catch up (which it did).
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.
IIRC most of Intel's expenses are related to the fabs and semiconductor R&D. The chip designs (the computer architecture part that gets computer people excited) is almost a rounding error on top of that. From that perspective Intel designs chips so that they can sell the silicon real estate they manufacture, not the other way around (that they have fabs so they can realize their chip design ambitions).
So if they would fab their chips somewhere else, they would be sitting on a huge expensive asset producing nothing. If they couldn't find a productive use for their fabs it would likely mean the end of the company. And if they can't produce their own chips in their own fabs, why would anyone else want to use Intel fabs?
Further, the vertical integration of fab process and chip design is something Intel regards as a competitive advantage. For a long time this was very much true, but it seems the hard work by TSMC and others have made it possible to make top-end chip designs on a merchant foundry process nowadays.
Intel at some point tried to play the merchant foundry game, but it seems it wasn't successful and they shut it down. Which perhaps isn't that unsurprising, considering TSMC, and to a lesser extent Globalfoundries, have been at that game for decades and they're good at it.
So all in all, I don't think fabbing their chips at some third party is a viable approach for Intel. Either they fix their process or they go under. "Go under" not necessarily meaning bankruptcy, it could also mean a massively, hugely downsized company doing chip designs to be fabbed at some third party. I think they're still far away from such a drastic step.
Re: Jim Keller to Depart Intel
#75Best guess: Jim Keller came in with guns blazing about how Moore's law is not dead and if you believe so you're stupid. 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 fo…
Got a source for that AGI claim?
Re: Jim Keller to Depart Intel
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
Intel's problem is that they fired expensive, older American workers and replaced them with H1B contractors. There's a video on AdoredTV about the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agxSclh27uo
Keeping up with the mood of the country (US) I want to call these comments out as racist propaganda. The casual reference to H1B workers(90% Indians) as root cause of problems in American tech companies is getting old.
If this statement didn't have racist intent, how would you know?
Re: Jim Keller to Depart Intel
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Every time I criticise Intel, Or more like pointing out facts , supporters will always use Jim Keller as the excuse, as if he was the silver bullet. 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 n…
The great man theory of chip design. In a few months we'll get a ton of the "Xe sucks because Raja's GPUs are always too hot" theory.
He lovingly lays each atom and then kisses each box gently before it heads out the door.
Re: Jim Keller to Depart Intel
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I'm not a hardware engineer/cpu designer/electrical engineer, but my understanding is that designing high end cpus requires engineering and designing towards the specific manufacturing process of the fabs you're using. Even if intel did decide to, I don't think they could just send their designs to tsmc/global foundries or what have you.
Not my expertise either, but it seems that the advantages of vertical integrations between fabbing and chip design being large was the "common wisdom" in the industry for a long time. But it seems that lately AMD/NVIDIA/TSMC and others have demonstrated that fabless chip companies and merchant foundries is a model capable of producing the highest end chips as well.
And yes, if for some reason Intel would want to fab their chips at some merchant foundry (see my sibling answer to yours why I think that's unlikely, but just for the sake of argument), I'm quite sure they couldn't just email the RTL's to the foundry and get chips back. It would take a lot of work to adapt the chips to the merchant foundry's process.
Re: Jim Keller to Depart Intel
#79Jim’s talk with Lex Friedman was quite amazing. Highly recommend listening- https://youtu.be/Nb2tebYAaOA
> If you constantly unpacked everything for deeper understanding, you're never going to get anything done. If you don't unpack understanding when you need to, you'll do the wrong thing. I really liked that quote. It's a great talk indeed.
It echoes a Confucius quote I like: “Learning without thinking is useless. Thinking without learning is dangerous.” (Analects 2:15)
Re: Jim Keller to Depart Intel
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
Process didn’t cause all the security holes implemented as performance hacks, architecture did. AMD caught up through architecture, process was just icing on the cake.
No one thought of speculative execution and hypertheading as performance hacks until the last few years. They were brilliant techniques. They still are, they just were found to have a cost. They are still used now but more carefully. Intel Management Engine and SGX on the other hand, are basically user-hostile parts of the hardware, with some bugs mixed in.
ME is exactly what Intel's data center customers want. It's only present in consumer CPUs because it doesn't scale to have separate ME and non-ME SKUs.