Hacker News Reader

Comment by comboy | Hacker News Reader

K8 seems pretty small after he made the fucking Zen architecture (and Tesla AI). Lex has good interviews with Jim[1], he's not just very smart, he is wise. He started Tenstorrent some time ago with Ljubisa Bajic so I'm assuming this fab is related. Here is youtube channel for Tenstorrent[2], and last time I checked it was getting under 100 views per video... Ian also interviewed him[3] some time ago.

Long story short if I had money that would be relevant in this context I would invest really hard into Tenstorrent.

Investing time to listen to the guy seems to be not worse.

1a. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nb2tebYAaOA

1b. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4hL5Om4IJ4

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzgyksS5pX8

3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFVDZeg4RVY

View on HN

> he made the fucking Zen architecture

From Jim himself:

> IC: A few people consider you 'The Father of Zen', do you think you’d scribe to that position? Or should that go to somebody else?

> JK: Perhaps one of the uncles. There were a lot of really great people on Zen. There was a methodology team that was worldwide, the SoC team was partly in Austin and partly in India, the floating-point cache was done in Colorado, the core execution front end was in Austin, the Arm front end was in Sunnyvale, and we had good technical leaders. I was in daily communication for a while with Suzanne Plummer and Steve Hale, who kind of built the front end of the Zen core, and the Colorado team. It was really good people. Mike Clark's a great architect, so we had a lot of fun, and success. Success has a lot of authors - failure has one. So that was a success. Then some teams stepped up - we moved Excavator to the Boston team, where they took over finishing the design and the physical stuff, Harry Fair and his guys did a great job on that. So there were some fairly stressful organizational changes that we did, going through that. The team all came together, so I think there was a lot of camaraderie in it. So I won't claim to be the ‘father’ - I was brought in, you know, as the instigator and the chief nudge, but part architect part transformational leader. That was fun.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16762/an-anandtech-interview-...

Well yes, this is exactly why I say he is wise. And also surprisingly humble. But if you listen to the whole story, how the architecture came to be, scratching reasons not to do it one by one etc., the picture seems pretty clear.

I’d be inclined to take the man at his word humility or not.

If he says it was a team effort, especially if he’s speaking clearly about the different aspects and who was responsible for them, I wouldn’t disagree with him. He would know after all.

Keller was also mainly hired to work on K12 ARM.

There are few human endeavours that aren’t team efforts. Even if we aren’t collaborating day to day, we still stand on the shoulders of giants all the time.

I would too, but this shows something to me with respect to his ability to launch a new fab: he knows what it takes to build and work with a team of teams, all with specialist knowledge. That’s something far more important than his ability to do everything himself, which is completely irrelevant at this scale.

That's very classy, humble and will go a very long way to get your team mates to want to work with you again in the future.

When Michael Schumacher won the race and became Formula One Champion, they asked him over radio how he feels. His response: "We did it, Ross you are the best!" Archetypically speaking, his and Kellers' behaviour shows they embody the good king.

Or maybe the other people involved are really, genuinely, just as important as him and there's no king, there's a team.

Its human nature to pick out heros, say they did everything by themselves and idolize them. That doesn't mean it's real. It's just a story you're telling yourself.

I've never heard about the people mentioned here, and I don't know anything about semiconductor manufacturing. Except that it's one of the absolute most complicated things humans have ever attempted and there's no way a single person could be the creator of an entire modern processor architecture. So I've been reading through this thread kind of surprised to see people saying this one person did so. But your comment made me realize it's just typical hero worship.

Note: this doesn't belittle the work of anyone. Schumacher is an amazing driver, one of the best in the world. But saying he is responsible for winning formula one races belittles the work of the other people involved, engineers at the top of their game just as much as he is, and yet faceless to most people. He could be exactly the driver he is, or even a hundred times better, and without equally talented engineers behind him he'd still finish in last place. So did he win the races, or did they? Obviously, the answer is that they won together.

I think the point being made above is that good leaders consistently and forcefully resist the invitation to take personal credit for accomplishments that is inevitably and repeatedly thrust upon them by the public eye.

We (The Team) did it. The good King puts his people first, like Marcus Aurelius. One example of a bad King is the Tyrant.

Or maybe there were more important people than him

Just because they arent celebrities it doesnt mean that they do not exist

Can someone add something to " the Arm front end "?

I'm interested to hear about this as well. I might be confabulating a bit, but just a bit, but I remember hearing Keller say that Zen is structured that way that there's nothing stopping them creating a different ISA frontend and say putting out an Arm processor instead of X64. That it actually wouldn't be much.

My guess was that that was a reference to the PSP.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Platform_Security_Processo...

So, AMD's IME?

Yes, exactly. Assuming that was what it referred to, it makes good sense to me.

No, AMD’s Zen had a sister uArch that was ARM-based[1]. They were originally targeting it for servers, but ended up releasing only one or two fairly bog standard ARM cores before abandoning the venture.

1 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_K12

You're right. I read the anandtech interview and it is clear that that is what he's referring to.

Basically all high-end CPU's in the last 20 years(almost 30 actually, it started with Pentium Pro in 1995) have small internal instruction set to which all of the instructions that are transmitted to CPU are converted. Part that converts instructions to microops is called frontend. There was canceled sister-architecture to Zen called K12, which, as far as I can tell, was basically just Zen with different frontend.

Others in the thread below have mentioned Jim Keller worked on DEC Alpha. DEC sued Intel for some patents related to Pentium, so even this bit of the history relates back to Jim somewhat.

Jim Keller is tied to basically every ground-breaking architecture of the last 30 years. Not that everything he's worked on has been a hit, but, if something ended up being a huge success there's a high probability Jim Keller has been skulking around somewhere. Conroe/Sandy Bridge are the only ones that come to mind that haven't been him.

His greatest hits: DEC Alpha, AMD K7 (Thunderbird/Athlon), AMD K8 (Athlon 64), Apple A5, AMD Zen... probably others I'm forgetting.

Like god damn can someone else in the industry have some ideas of their own please, lol /s

And again not that other people aren't involved either, in particular Mike Clark was really the guy who executed Zen development, but Keller was there at least as an advisor for a lot of the early development. He's one of Zen's uncles, Clark is the father. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vyNzgOP5yw

I think it also says a lot that he completely fucking bailed from Intel after only being there a couple months... I think he saw they just weren't ready/willing to execute well and his time would be wasted there. He's the wandering silicon samurai who drops some golden nuggets of advice and wanders off into the sunset, not a babysitter while you purge middle-managers playing office politics.

(He left due to a "family situation" and while I have no doubt that it was real... I also think he probably might have stayed if Intel wasn't a complete dumpster fire too.)

Right. Back when Keller and Dobberpuhl were at P.A. Semi, I was waiting for them to IPO so I could invest... very low power 64-bit dual-core PPC chips from a few of the key Alpha people seemed just what Apple needed to solve their problems with IBM not being able to get the G5 power consumption down low enough for laptops.

I was disappointed when Apple switched to x86 instead, and a few years later, Apple acquired P.A. Semi, which I believe became the bulk of Apple's mobile processor team.

If rumor is to be believed, it really is too bad that Ken Olsen refused to drop margins and increase volume on the Alpha in order to create a scaled down version for Apple back when Apple was looking to leave the m68k architecture.

ronin, samurai are loyal to the end, no? :)

even if he's not the determining factor of success - as he clearly said it's a team effort - he's very likely a safe bet, and a good canary, a good advisor (not a yes-man).

Not correcting you, just trying to learn. Is that also called microcode?

Not quite. When you have a front end that spits an instruction into micro-ops that's a fixed mapping of 1 to 1-3 instruction and your decoder can handle many of those every clock. When you a micro-coded instruction you can have that instruction turn into a whole subroutine of indefinite length and on most current designs you can only decode one at once and it takes over until it completes.

Man, TIL. Thank you. Had no idea about this architecture.

Micro ops are a level higher than microcode.

Check out this interview with the actual architect of Zen, Mike Clark.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vyNzgOP5yw

Probably the most interesting nugget is that Zen2 was actually considered a tweak internally and not a full uarch revision, while Zen3 is actually the clean-sheet revision. But it's just a good summary of the general tone and tempo of CPU development I think.

Jim certainly didn't start Tenstorrent, but he did join it a while back.

Some former AMD employees started it.

Ljubisa here[1] says they incorporated only after Jim put money in it and it was a few months after they started thinking.

1. https://youtu.be/sMvudTBBQNw?t=289

You're right, he may have been an early investor too.

Jim was the Angel investor, so to speak.

> Long story short if I had money that would be relevant in this context I would invest really hard into Tenstorrent.

I would happily accept a bet (e.g. $100 bucks or a nice bottle of whiskey) from you (or anyone) that atomicsemi is successful. I will just bet against it because I am skeptical that a new company is successful in a capital intensive segment.

It is probably slightly insulting, foolish, and arrogant to bet against the famous Jim Killer on a website dedicated to startups. This should not be a dig against Sam and Jim Killer. I guess that will try something truly innovative. But if I look a the past, the odds seem to be stacked against them.

I would not bet on atomicsemi, I think it's just a tool for prototyping in quick iterations.

And Tenstorrent I still see as a risky bet, but in my mind it's very +EV.

Everything is ML nowadays and we still use very naive approach driven by what hardware was available at hand.

> I would invest really hard into Tenstorrent

How would one go about doing this?

Have a big stack of cash and contact the founders to pitch being an investor.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com