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Comment by speeder | Hacker News Reader

AMD hired the genius CPU designer Jim Keller, that is it.

His previous stint on AMD was when he invented AMD64.

I don't know much about Jim Keller, but a CPU architecture is far too complex for a single person to possible be responsible for such leaps. You can't just take an average team, add one exceptional person, and get results this good. I'm sure he's exceptionally good, but focusing on Keller like that seems rather unfair to all the other engineers who made this possible.

Jim has had such frequent success that I think he may have the rare talent of running large technical teams well. I suspect that may be what his talent is rather than CPU design. But maybe both, or maybe he has just gotten lucky.

I think the 2 key high level choices AMD made was betting on TSMC, and betting on the chiplet + memory controller design.

I don't know enough about CPU archtecture to chime in on that aspect, but I can say from experience that a single person with enough weight/respect behind his/her name can certainly get a stuck team moving in the right direction. I don't know what AMD's situation was at the time, but it's possible that no one felt they had the pull to change directions and his fame allows him come in and change the whole dynamic. Just a thought.

Keller left in 2015. It's quite unlikely he had any impact on Zen 3's substantial IPC gains over Zen 2.

Also worth noting that Keller was at Intel between 2018 and 2020.

and leaving Intel for "personal reasons"...

We only can guess what they can be?

His child has leukemia.

I suspect he would have left no matter what though, because Intel is so arrogant they wouldn't listen to him in the manner in which they would to.

That was the great thing about AMD; when you're already at rock bottom, you're humbled enough to listen to people.

I think this is an important reason, being down and hungry can do wonders for focus and quality. On the other hand doing well over many years means that wrong people got promoted and stay around and grow a big middle management layer that is invested mostly in themselves.

AMD either did well or went broke which forces management to take painful but important decisions.

> His child has leukemia.

source?

Pretty sure the stuff he worked on out extended out to zen4

How much do you think a one-of-a-kind designer like Jim Keller makes? I'm looking at his wikipedia page, and he's worked for AMD, Apple, Intel, Telsa. They all want him. I can only assume there's a bidding war on his talent.

My totaly uneducated guess is: $2M base salary, and $20M in stock options per year.

My question is: how do you get into this line of work? Does anyone know how Jim Keller got to be such a one-of-a-kind chipset designer?

Who gets to be a chipset designer, even in times when JK started his career? Just very few people have an opportunity to try their hand at this, and JK was blessed with being able to go from one good team, to another, and mostly isolated from corporate bs.

A big part of his success story, was him having this great opportunity to develop his skills.

Microelectronics is a career suicide in comparison to software today.

I'd say 100 to 1 sieve off rate for people getting into the industry, to ones who actually get to do serious architecture work would be too small. The ratio is likely to be much larger.

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