haha you beat me to it Denial :P ... we will have to wait and see the fruits of his labor ... i so wish i hear in 6 months ... Jim Keller joins Risk 5 !

More like... "Nope, not gonna happen with these guys. Better leave before I get the blame for their corporate culture failures"

He's been with Apple, AMD, Intel, PA Semi (ARM processors) and others. Quite a promiscuous guy 😀. Wonder where he's going next.

alanm:

Quite a promiscuous guy 😀. Wonder where he's going next.

SpaceX (or Tesla) I smell rocket fuel ;-) Oh wait, he is already there. Guess he wants to focus now !

angelgraves13:

He left a sinking ship. Good for him. It's time we all watch Intel sink or swim.

You fanboy's are great entertainment. Despite what you guy's want to believe, the facts are Intel is still ahead of AMD both financially and in business. And you know Jim worked for AMD too, what was your excuse when he left them?

When Jim left AMD, he had done what he needed to do then. It appears now though Intel has broken Jim, rather than Jim fixed Intel. Sad times.

I am fairly certain that Keller left AMD before the Ryzen launch so leaving in itself is not a bad sign. But hanging around for another 6 months clearly shows that he hasn’t finished everything he planned.

we can not know yet and certainly they will not tell us :P but Jim Keller goes to companies does a design and then he rides in the sunset ...pretty much :P

Or, you know, he has actual personal reasons, in this time much stuff could've happened to affect anyones live to re-evaluate early retirement if one can afford it.

Venix:

we can not know yet and certainly they will not tell us 😛 but Jim Keller goes to companies does a design and then he rides in the sunset ...pretty much 😛

Exactly, there is no reason for company to waste his time once he did his thing. He even put plans for Zen 4 for AMD. He could have staid and see results unfold and make future products even better as he would notice opportunities. But his valuable input would be underused then. Questions are: "Did he finish what he considered important or not?" "Did he put in place technological roadmap for CPUs for next 3~4 years, or is intel going to release what they have and poor future improvements again?"

Then look like the new Intel arch design its almost finished. Hopefully Jim Keller will be in good shape for the next project(s).

Had to look at his wiki just to be sure. So he joined AMD in 2012 and left in 2015. Ryzen only launched in 2017 (We ARE getting old, damn). So... Unless Intel's plans pre-Keller were garbage and they decide to scrap it all, maybe we won't see his actual work until... 2022? The 6 months of being a consultant also sound a bit strange, kind of like there is a real problem (personal) and he just had to take his time off. Don't think it happened when he left AMD, so maybe his work isn't finished yet?

Every time Jim Keller leaves a project, some people blames him for failing, but then he becomes the guru in charge of miraculous technology... even if he was only responsible of fraction of it... I thought his role was to make a new strategy for Intel with all the technology they already had, but during last years Intel bought so many other companys with their own portfolios and engineers, that it's impossible to predict the result. Years ago, before Zen era, Intel fired a lot of workers and engineers to make even more profit of its leading on the market. Nowadays they are doing the opposite, trying not to lag behind o_O Edit: Those 6 months of consultant can be part of the contract, like a clause or part of the legal agreement, it looks something quite normal...

I wonder if it's because of all of the security holes they keep finding?

Luc:

Every time Jim Keller leaves a project, some people blames him for failing, but then he becomes the guru in charge of miraculous technology... even if he was only responsible of fraction of it... I thought his role was to make a new strategy for Intel with all the technology they already had, but during last years Intel bought so many other companys with their own portfolios and engineers, that it's impossible to predict the result. Years ago, before Zen era, Intel fired a lot of workers and engineers to make even more profit of its leading on the market. Nowadays they are doing the opposite, trying not to lag behind o_O Edit: Those 6 months of consultant can be part of the contract, like a clause or part of the legal agreement, it looks something quite normal...

You have a point Jim gets a lot of credit even after he is gone. However I don't think its undue. If you listen to him and people that know him he is obviously extremely intelligent and a lifelong learner much like Bill Gates. I think a lot of early decisions you make make in CPU design are what make or break the design a couple years later and he has been pretty on point over the years. Like for example having AMD use chiplets which if you hear from others he was pushing chiplets with quite a bit of push back from others in AMD and that one little decision has been AMD's saving grace.

JamesSneed:

You have a point Jim gets a lot of credit even after he is gone. However I don't think its undue. If you listen to him and people that know him he is obviously extremely intelligent and a lifelong learner much like Bill Gates. I think a lot of early decisions you make make in CPU design are what make or break the design a couple years later and he has been pretty on point over the years. Like for example having AMD use chiplets which if you hear from others he was pushing chiplets with quite a bit of push back from others in AMD and that one little decision has been AMD's saving grace.

Ya it's definitely not undue - he did an interview recently with Lex Fridman and it's pretty clear that the guy is willing to innovate no matter the cost. As a company you obviously have risk assessments you need to make - it's hard to know how technology is going to pan out, if an endeavor such as a complete architecture redesign is going to be a colossal waste of resources or a giant leap forward. Which is why companies like Intel that sit on 80%+ marketshare typically don't care to change things much. It's a lot of risk for little reward. On the flipside, Keller in the interview states he thinks every company should be throwing away it's entire architecture and starting from scratch every five years. That's insane. Not only from financial risk perspective but even from a chip design perspective - it's not an easy task to start from scratch. Even just building the team, scheduling the entire process, organizing it, etc.. like the framework to even begin designing it, is a massive task in itself - let alone doing the actual design. But it seems like it's something Keller loves to tackle - he typically goes into these companies as a team lead, builds out the framework needed for rapid innovation, executes and leaves before the product is even shipped. Intel hired him for the same reason - they gave him freedom to come in and change what he needed to drive innovation. Obviously those changes take a while to filter through to actual product design - so we won't see the fruit of his work for another year or so (unless of course the reason why he left is because they didn't give him enough room) but yeah, it's easy to see why he gets credit - he's a guy that not only knows his shit about the design side of CPUs but he knows how to build a management team and create space for innovation within these companies that are typically risk-adverse.

Here's my speculation : he left AMD for a BBD - bigger and better deal. He probably thought he had accomplished enough to put AMD on a course for success so his work there was done and that seems to have been proven correct. The bigger and better deal was a pile of stock options to do the same thing for Intel he did for AMD. It seems to me he is leaving Intel a bit prematurely because it remains to be seen what, if anything, he has contributed there. My guess, because none of my friends at Intel will say anything, is he did most of the architectural work he wanted to do at Intel and then he hit a wall of frustration. Frustration with Intel's inability get a working process at smaller dimensions than they have now. That is the key for his architectural work to be embodied in silicon because currently it can not be. They can simulate their processors all they want but until they are taped out and built in silicon it really doesn't matter. I bet Intel is sitting on a whole new generations of processor that currently can't see the light of day because their processes are unable to make them yet. Either that or they were so caught off-guard by AMD they bagged that generation and started over. That seems unlikely since JK has been at Intel long enough to have told them what to expect. Another guess is he got so frustrated with fighting to get things done they way he wants them done, which were different than how Intel had been doing things as you can see by their current designs as compared to AMD's, that he gave up and bailed. Either are fairly likely I think but we will probably never know unless he feels like telling us. My guess for the future is he will end up with a company designing ARM-based chips. There is a lot of activity with those for servers right now. Another possibility is Nvidia. He could go there and work on CPUs for the next generation(s) of DGX. Nvidia does work with ARM-based chips too so those two things might coincide.

BBD: Tesla/SpaceX ... where he is still employed, probably going full-throttle there. Intel was just a side-project (they probably begged him - with a lot of money) https://electrek.co/2020/02/07/tesla-self-driving-computer-designer-jim-keller-confident-solving-autonomous-driving/ He is literally creating the future of autonomous cars and AI, in a company which really pushes this future. (And that company isn't either Intel or AMD) Watch the interview: [youtube=ymcOLL2qEg8]

JamesSneed:

You have a point Jim gets a lot of credit even after he is gone. However I don't think its undue. If you listen to him and people that know him he is obviously extremely intelligent and a lifelong learner much like Bill Gates. I think a lot of early decisions you make make in CPU design are what make or break the design a couple years later and he has been pretty on point over the years. Like for example having AMD use chiplets which if you hear from others he was pushing chiplets with quite a bit of push back from others in AMD and that one little decision has been AMD's saving grace.

Sure, I think the same, it just was a sarcasm failed attempt... 😳

seems like he leaves just before a company leapfrogs the competition, he already did apple/amd twice/tesla, now apparently intel too, whats left? nvidia doesnt seem to need him, maybe huawei? mediatek? oh yes qualcomm needs a proper beating