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Comment by jorvi | Hacker News Reader

> Intel might be hard pressed to catch up to this

We were constantly saying this about AMD until Zen, and Zen is largely credited to Jim Keller. Where did Jim Keller go after Zen? Intel. I'm lowkey afraid that AMD will run out of steam after one or two gens and Intel+Keller will have just finished developing an insane architecture that brings us right back to the pre-Zen era.

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>Where did Jim Keller go after Zen? Intel.

He didn't went straight to Intel, You missed Tesla in between. And anything he is doing will be 2022+ at the earliest. Intel already has a roadmap of Chips that were delayed by Fabs, and that is at least up to 2022 / 2023.

I am pretty sure AMD has many competent people too. And as far as I could tell, I don't ever see engineering talent as a problem in any big tech companies. There are lots of insanely great engineers from Microsoft and even Oracle that most have not heard of, but most of the talents are hampered by cooperate politics and culture. And so far AMD seems to have a far better culture under Dr Lisa Su than Intel.

It's a cycle we've seen before. Just enjoy the ride and take the benefit while it's there. Hopefully things are different this time, but many of us remember when AMD beat Intel to 1GHz and also the major win that was amd64 and the overclocking madness that came with Barton. This industry is cyclical in nature. I am an AMD fanboi from the K6-2 days, so I am a restrained optimist about the current wins.

> This industry is cyclical in nature.

I mis-read it as "cynical in nature", and it still fits. May the best process win.

People who know these things have said that Zen was principally designed by a different individual, not Keller. I'm trying to find the link/who that person is.

Mike Clark. I have no inside information but the rumor I have read is that Keller was mostly responsible for the cancelled AMD ARM effort while Clark did Zen. Clark is explicitly credited as the architect/principal designer for Zen 2.

Mike Clark (~tech lead) and Suzanne Plummer (~engineering group lead) are usually mentioned as the most important people.

I'd really like that despite Intel being in the driver's seat again - because I honestly don't see where single core performance is going to come from in the future. IPC increased because the CPUs used the inherent possible parallelism in normal code where often calculations don't depend on the value of the previous calculation. But now it seems to me like we're pretty much at the limit of that, adding more integer units/prefetchers/etc. isn't going to give us the growth we're used to. Cache is something with a decent amount of potential, but once that is gone, what are they going to do?

Well that's how competition works.

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