Written by | The Power of Machines
"Jim Keller was a rock star and Intel has lost a great architect," President of Moor Insights and Strategy and chief analyst Patrick Moorhead told the media.
Machine Heart News on June 12, Intel announced that Jim Keller, senior vice president in charge of the Silicon Engineering Group, has resigned due to personal reasons, and his resignation is effective immediately. However, Jim Keller will remain as a consultant to the company for six months to assist with the transition.
Jim Keller is one of the architects of Intel's new architecture. Before announcing his resignation, he had worked at Intel for two years and proposed innovative methods such as 3D stacked chips. Intel said he will remain on staff as a consultant for another six months to facilitate the transition. With Keller's departure, Intel also made a series of organizational structural adjustments:
Although Jim Keller is little known outside the computer industry, he is undoubtedly a superstar in the chip field.
His designs helped turn AMD from a failure into a respected competitor; Tesla cars can recognize red lights and stop signs because of his designs. From iPhones to Google cloud servers to Xbox game consoles, his core work is hidden in all chips.
Leave "masterpieces" wherever he goes
As a legend in the semiconductor industry, Jim Keller has a rich experience in the industry during his nearly 40-year career. , although he changed jobs frequently, he left traces wherever he went - he left many classic works while working at companies such as Intel, Tesla, AMD, Apple and Alpha, yes, you know " Many of the stories of "Turn Over" were written by him.
The first chip to run at 500 MHz with a memory cache of 1 GHz, an unheard of speed at the time. Alpha also pioneered running software instructions out of order to improve performance.
Jim Keller has the deepest relationship with AMD. During his two experiences working for AMD, he has successively led the AMD Opteron (K7 and K8 X86-64 architecture) and Zen architecture. Both the mainstream Ryzen and the feverish Ryzen ThreadRipper are surprising.
In the field of servers and data centers, AMD once achieved a 27% market share in the server field with Opteron, which is unparalleled for a while.
The Opteron was one of the first 64-bit processors to be installed in servers and pioneered a data communications standard called HyperTransport that is still widely used in cloud computing today.
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Keller is committed to improving graphics capabilities. The chip that powered the original iPad and iPhone 4 enabled Apple's first high-resolution "Retina" display.
Tesla says its first in-house artificial intelligence chip, designed to enable autonomous driving, is 20 times more powerful than the Nvidia chip it replaces.
The low-power chip was one of Intel's first Keller-influenced designs, designed to run small portable devices but scale to PCs.
Two joined Intel: "Attracted by his deep struggle"
Every time Three turned around, he was stuck at the node
Before joining Intel, Jim · Keller has become a legend. AMD has challenged Intel several times over the past 20 years, and the success of Apple's A series is closely related to it.
Jim Keller worked at DEC in the 1990s and was involved in the design of the Alpha processor project. This experience gave him an in-depth understanding of the Alpha processor and paved the way for subsequent experiences.
After DEC was acquired, a large number of talents left the company. AMD CEO Jerry Sanders, who was eager for talents at the time, immediately recruited a large number of senior engineers from the Alpha project, including Jim Keller. After entering AMD, Keller participated in the design of the K7 processor and later became the main architect of K8. Since this started AMD's counterattack against Intel, this was an important addition to Jim Keller's career.
The comprehensive performance of K7 surpassed the Pentium III (codenamed Katamai) of the same frequency, which shocked all users. Jim Keller also led the core research and development of the K8 architecture that pushed the war to its climax, but he left AMD in the second year. In the eyes of many people, Keller's sudden departure seems to be anticlimactic. However, AMD Chief Technology Officer Fred Weber has a different view.
"I don't think, he (left) without completing the task, he definitely completed it." "He was more of a front-line person on the project. The good news is, his front-line did so much Work has set such a good direction.”
For an engineer among engineers, solving clear and interesting problems always comes first. “Engineers like to work and don’t want to talk nonsense anymore. ." he said. At the next stop of his journey, a very important node changed to Apple.
A very important reason why Apple's A-series processors have achieved today's market position and performance is the acquisition of PA-Semi in 2008. The company was founded in 2003 by Daniel W. Dobberpuhl, who focuses on high-end personal computer and server chips, and they all worked for DEC.
Daniel W. Dobberpuhl's status in the semiconductor field is currently difficult for Jim Keller to match. However, in the few years since joining PA-Semi, Jim Keller continued to accumulate experience in the design of low-power RISC processors under the leadership of his boss. Until 2008, Apple acquired PA-Semi.
For Keller, Apple's appeal is twofold. One is to learn from the world's toughest and most successful CEO, Steve Jobs; the other is the challenges and fun brought by emerging smartphones.
Prior to this, the first three versions of the iPhone all used Samsung chips. After Keller joined, he established Apple's own chip team. Starting with the iPhone 4, Apple used chips designed by Keller. He has the greatest impact on Apple's A6 and A7 (these two chips are used in the iPhone 5 and 5s). Not only is the design faster than the competition, the chip is also optimized for smoother graphics processing that dwarfs the competition. In addition, the chip also accelerates the iPhone's voice processing and provides support for Siri.
Keller also absorbed a motto from Jobs, which also resonated in his subsequent glory: "Once you know what the right thing is, that's all you should do." Things."
Subsequently, Keller, seeing new problems and opportunities, returned to AMD, which was in dire straits. The market advantage Keller brought to AMD has faded at this time, and Intel has once again taken the lead. He knows the reason:
AMD chip designs are intricate and difficult to improve, and excellent engineers will spend a long time optimizing the design of old chips. What is needed at this time is not optimization, but the use of new technologies to start from scratch.
Chips are essentially like building Lego: using smaller, individually fabricated chunks of silicon assembled into larger, more complex chips. Keller realized that he could make new chips for computationally intensive activities, such as deep learning, by combining several small chips together. Such designs are cheaper than a single integrated chip but still powerful, and the modular setup allows for increased computing power without generating too much heat. These chiplets can also work in larger configurations to meet the needs of cloud computing data centers.
"He has that crazy concentration." This is what colleagues said about him. The first chips he designed were called the Ryzen series, which didn't hit the market until 2017.
The price is lower than Intel, but in some cases, the performance exceeds Intel, causing a stir in the market. By 2019, third-generation Ryzen chips, still using Keller's design, beat their former rivals in almost every way.
At this point, the typical ending of the story happened again: before Ryzen was launched, the great master had already turned around and left.
Si met Musk and fell in love with manufacturing
“He is the Forrest Gump of our industry,” AMD’s former chief technology officer Fred Weber once commented, “He is always in interesting situations. ""
After returning to his old club to create miracles, the great master moved to Tesla. Remember when Musk talked about factory automation at the 2016 shareholder meeting? At that time, he also talked about the system on a chip (SOC). The main reason was that Keller joined Tesla in January 2016.
Musk wants to build self-driving cars, but neither Intel nor Nvidia’s products are enough to satisfy this talented engineer. Before joining Tesla, Keller had truly regarded cars as a challenge in the computer field. During the job interview, Keller convinced Musk that he could design a patented chip that would run 10 times faster than his opponent.
Once he understood how Tesla's software worked, Keller found that components of Nvidia's chips that were less relevant to Tesla's software could be ignored or minimized. In 2019, the chips designed by Keller began to be incorporated into the Model 3 series and other models, and the company's performance also increased 20 times.
However, the most impressive thing is that Keller also added a function to the chip design: Model 3 will automatically park when encountering red lights and stop signs.
Keller was fascinated by Tesla's manufacturing operations. By watching the car assembly process, he found that although many parts need to be used for 5 or 10 years, the chips need to be updated frequently, once every two or three years. So he convinced Tesla to redesign the way the computer components connected to the rest of the car, making it easier for the company to replace chip boards.
Five turns later
Just the day before Keller left Intel, Intel released a new Lakefield hybrid processor, including the low-power Tremont processor he participated in the design of , for Keller, he has completed his current task at Intel.
Perhaps, just like every time I turned around in the past, I couldn’t wait to watch my work bear market fruits. After completing the most groundbreaking new work, I went to seek the next exciting problem and solution. road.
In view of Jim Keller's "deep friendship" with his former employer AMD and the latter's rapid development in recent years, many people speculate that he "may return to AMD", which can be said to be "Once an AMD forever an AMD" ”.
Some people also speculate that he may return to Apple. Because Bloomberg reported some time ago that Apple may announce at this year’s WWDC 2020 that its Mac products will switch from Intel processors to ARM processors. What a coincidence of timing.
For the current unpredictable chip market, this heavyweight’s “resumption of singlehood” will inevitably trigger a new competition for talents. I wonder if there will be a major Chinese manufacturer this time?