Jim Keller and his pioneering work on chip design and architecture
edn.com
edn.com
https://wccftech.com/jim-keller-tenstorrent-wants-to-compete...
Other super talented people want to work with a Jim Keller. So a company hires a Jim Keller not just because you want his brain, but because you can then go to the next 20 amazing people in the industry and say "come work on Jim Keller's team" – now you have 20 min Jim Kellers on your team and that is enough to move mountains in an extremely specialized field such as chip design.
That being said, even a strong team is still usually only as good as its leadership. You can have all the great ideas in the world, but if the organisation does not allow you to pursue them (or on the other extreme, allows everyone to work on what they think is best) you will still fail to execute.
At the end of the day you need someone to make the correct decisions every step of the way.
Having a good grasp of everything in the whole stack is obviously helpful for setting priorities and goals, and there's a lot of leadership skills involved in getting people to work together and follow the organizational goals. Having a track record of success is obviously helpful, too.
it’s a pity he left Intel so quickly. After he was gone, his 5 goals basically fell by the wayside. I don’t think people like being told they’re doing it wrong. I still try to listen to any podcast or interview with him, because I think he has many deep insights.
"This is how were going to validate this chip:
1. go to the beach
2. open your laptop
3. run the chip in emulation through boot
4. tape-in! (send to the fab)
5. take the rest of the year off at the beach "
His point was that we need a simple focus on proving the chip works and then shipping it. If any validation milestone or objective is not directly connected to that, it's not worth doing. We don't need all this extraneous validation and multiple layers of rechecking. Just emulate the thing and then your done.
In his interview with Jordan Petersen he talked about how some people spend all their time "admiring the problem"; Trying to understand and categorize it. Keller didn't want to spend any more time talking about the problem then needed. He was focused on finding good solutions (and it had to be a good solution), and then executing them.
We will see if Jim Keller's many talents include managing software.
And they're blurring the line by adding more AI-focused acceleration instructions to their GPUs (maybe focused on their CDNA line rather than the consumer RDNA, but they're expanding their capabilities on both).
There seems to be a bit of a philosophy difference between NVidia and AMD acceleration - NVidia add new specialised "cores", while AMD adds those similar capabilities as accelerated instructions to their shader units.
Though this might just be marketing - I don't think we've got an open reference for the NVidia shader ISA like we do with AMD so difficult to compare, but the capabilities and integration in shaders of many of these acceleration paths seems to imply they might also be implemented as shader instructions, which stretches the definition of a separate "core" to me, and so might just be a marketing difference rather than anything technical. Same with things like the BVH acceleration used in ray tracing - AMD added shader instructions, while NVidia talks loudly about "RT Cores".
Erm, Itanium never had any kind of market leadership. It was a failure.
That's true. But part of the reason Itanium as a failure is because AMD came out with x86-64, which was so successful that Intel ended up being forced to adopt it (it didn't help that the first generation of Itanium chips was... underwhelming).
This is in contrast to many other podcasters who stay engrossed in surface level details and never graduate to thinking about overarching concepts. Lex just zooms there too fast sometimes.
Lex's done some of my favorite geek interviews. Just from memory: Stephen Kotkin, Roger Penrose, Lisa Feldman Barrett, Everyday Astronaut, Jim Keller, his own father. Many more I'm sure, if I consulted Lex's archive.
I skip over the episodes with culture warriors. I've already had my fill, thank you very much.
Steven Pinker and Eric Schmidt were in the first ten guests and Elon Musk wasn’t long after. I’m sure Rogan got him more high profile cage fighters and that type of guest, though.
Once you have some, they might have introduced him to others like a chain or linked list (if that sounds better ref)
Lex shared this on his podcast as well: It's not easy to find or get hold of Donald Knuth. But, he kept trying and finally got him. Persistence pays, I guess.
He is ok. Not that bad.
Lex Friedman just interrupted him in a whiny voice to say "it's not thaaat simple". He basically just got in Jim Keller's way. It would be like someone interrupting a john carmack presentation every few minutes to say "I don't know about all that". It was a shame.
Unrelated, but Fridman's proclivity for injecting Elon Musk as a discussion topic into the vast majority of his interviews is genuinely weird.
Or Aliens, or asking for the meaning of life.
I understand that until recently he kind of stayed out of the public spotlight, and I wonder why, because he has such a great presence.
I don't think you understand what $8 per vehicle represents in cost savings.
$8 in parts can literally be 10s of million in savings per year.
And then you are basically tied to this supplier forever as switching something so fundamental isn't easy.
In automotive, using less screws to save 50c on each vehicle is considered a big win.
That's at least a few engineers salaries. ;)
Not just for V1, but the following version as well. Once you have an internal team, you can vertically integrate and costume the solution to your needs exactly rather then buying a generic part from a supplier.
Things like OTA updates are just easier if you control the software and hardware stack yourself.
And once you have a team with expertise you can use them for other projects as well, like Dojo.
A clever one I saw was where they milled a PCB thinner in a section to make it bendy and did not need 2 boards because of this.