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In Silicon Valley, we take things like faster chips and Moore's Law for granted. It seems that progress is still inevitable, given the history of semiconductors and achievements of chip makers like Intel, which will turn 50 this year.
But advances in flea processing require a lot of work. This explains why Intel announced in April that it had hired Jim Keller as senior vice president. He will lead the company's silicon engineering efforts, which include setting up chips that can handle just about any task in a system.
The hiring of Keller turned heads. , the person who defines what a whole family of chips could look like. The design of chips is becoming more complicated, sometimes requiring thousands of engineers working on as complex details as designing the flow of people and traffic in a 3D metropolis
Linley Gwennap, long-time badyst from the Linley Group, speculates that Keller take a fresh look at Intel's aging x86 architecture from scratch. Or he could work on the next chip designs for artificial intelligence, or to marry with more than one chip in a system. These all represent great ideas in the $ 412 billion semiconductor industry.
Keller does not say what he is working on yet, and maybe he will not do it for years. But I spoke with him about his hiring and advertising around his movements, which are closely monitored in the industry. He's not an advertising researcher, but he's had a remarkable career as a chip architect. He debuted at Digital Equipment Corp., where he played a role in the design of the DEC Alpha processors of the 1990s.
Above: Intel chip architects design chips manufactured in giant factories billions of dollars. Intel
In 1998, he joined AMD, where he worked on the Athlon processor (K7) and led the K8 project which disrupted Intel's Itanium 64-bit chips and gave AMD its first place in the lucrative market. server chips. Then, in 1999, as the Internet bubble grew, he went to start-up SiByte, which Broadcom acquired in 2000 for $ 2 billion in shares. When the bubble collapsed, the value of this transaction and Broadcom's hypergrowth also declined.
In 2004, Keller moved to senior engineering at P.A. Semi, a startup dedicated to mobile processors. Then he moved to Apple in early 2008. Apple also bought the P.A. Semi-team, which went to work on the Series A processors for iPhone. It was part of Steve Jobs' strategy to become independent of the chip makers, and it has proven to be a brilliant move that has saved billions of Apple dollars.
In 2012, Keller felt a change ahead. Progress in PC processors was slowing down. He joined AMD to lead a new microarchitecture called Zen. AMD launched the first Zen-based chips in 2017, and for the first time in years, the company is rapidly gaining a stake in Intel. In 2015, Keller left AMD and joined Tesla to work on autopilot engineering for the company's electric cars. (There is no doubt that Tesla's CEO, Elon Musk, is tired of paying Nvidia for the AI chips for Tesla's electric cars). Now, for the first time, this famous processor architect works at the world's largest processor manufacturer
Here is a revised transcript of our interview
Above: Jim Keller is senior vice president at Intel.
: Intel
VentureBeat: I was looking at a story of Motley Fool from last year that talked about this famous chip architect, Jim Keller. Apparently, there can be a famous designer of chips.
Jim Keller: I had no idea. I got to Tesla and they had a bio for me. I said, "Where did you get that?" They said, "It's your Wikipedia page." I thought: "I have a Wikipedia page?" J & I I sent this to my mother. She was pretty impressed.
VentureBeat: This is an interesting time. People have heard of things you have done. It's interesting for me, having covered semiconductors since 1994. What do you think of this notoriety or notoriety? What does it mean about where we are?
Keller: I have no idea. Aside from boasting to my kids. I am 12 years old and 13 years old. They think it's pretty cool that someone calls me a guru on a web page. You can not beat that. But there are many famous technologists. I am not exactly a renowned researcher. I was surprised that there was a forum on some products that I did, where people were pbadionately talking about the choices I was making and why, what I was going to do next.
The fact that people are pbadionate about their computers – the gamer guys are particularly pbadionate about the processor and the GPU and the next game and the framerate, and the people behind that. Above: Jim Keller helped AMD draw Zen architecture, which kicks Intel's butt off yet.
Photo credit: Dean Takahashi
VentureBeat: I think they can say that whoever is behind something sometimes makes a big difference.
Keller: Yes, it is normal. The fact that they even go so far as to understand that someone like me, who has relatively little public footprint – I've been lucky. I worked at Digital, which was a great place to work. Then I went to AMD and some startups and Apple and back to AMD for a second try on this relationship. Tesla was super interesting. And then I was asked to join Intel, which was great.
VentureBeat: It seems like you do not mind going from one job to the next.
Keller: ] I really like to work on the next product, the next really interesting problem. I am an architect, but the problem of working with organizations to create products is also a very interesting problem. Find people – people are so interesting, right? There are innovative people. There are conscientious people. There are people who excel in team work. Verification people always used to bother me, because I worried for everything. Then I realized that it was a great plan. Some people worry about everything and you need it. But I like the dynamic technical problems and the organization to go solve them.
VentureBeat: It seems like it becomes very strategic from time to time. What you did at Apple contributed to their independence from chip vendors. This seems to have helped them go more vertically and retain more profits in their business
Keller: It was the idea of Steve Jobs, not mine. I am a computer architect. When I was invited to work there, it was like, "Well, what am I going to work on?" They said, "It's a secret." So, I I had virtually no idea of this idea. Oddly enough, when I was there, I worked with Intel on some Mac products, and that was interesting too.
Above: A photo of the Intel Core 8th Gen processor
Image Credit: Intel
VentureBeat: The notion that large systems companies can and should design their own chips, what do you usually think? Compared to the notion that chip makers like Intel can provide this.
Keller: I've been in this business long enough to see both verticalization and horizontalisation. The pendulum oscillates back and forth. It will continue to swing. There are different reasons for this at different times. We are two points of inflection in terms of technological change. Mobile is still running in the industry, low power. The expansion of the cloud has been incredible. We are in an AI revolution, if you count the startups in this space.
Whenever you have inflection points, things move a little, but there are constants – foundries are really difficult. The design of the high-end processor is really difficult. Gathering the components to make a really differentiated and very valuable processor is difficult. If you look at the semiconductor market today, it continues to grow on the top line. The rooms in the middle move a little. Some standard products come from large companies and others are custom-made in-house. The combination of this has changed several times over the last three years, but the stability of super hard problems tends to be designed by people who are experts
