Thursday, April 26th 2018
Ryzen Architect Jim Keller Joins Intel
Jim Keller, the VLSI guru who led the team behind AMD's spectacular comeback in the x86 processor market with "Zen," has reportedly quit his job at Tesla to join AMD's bête noire, Intel. Following his work on "Zen," Keller had joined Tesla to work on self-driving car hardware. Keller joins Raja Koduri at Intel, the other big former-AMD name, who led Radeon Technologies Group (RTG).
PC Perspective comments that big names like Keller and Koduri joining Intel could provide clues as to Intel's current state and the direction it's heading in. The company appears to be in a state of shake-up from a decade of complacency and lethargy in its core business. Koduri could be putting together a team of people familiar to him for a new clean-slate project. The last time Intel had a clean slate was ten years ago, with "Nehalem."
Source:
PC Perspective
PC Perspective comments that big names like Keller and Koduri joining Intel could provide clues as to Intel's current state and the direction it's heading in. The company appears to be in a state of shake-up from a decade of complacency and lethargy in its core business. Koduri could be putting together a team of people familiar to him for a new clean-slate project. The last time Intel had a clean slate was ten years ago, with "Nehalem."
81 Comments on Ryzen Architect Jim Keller Joins Intel
Let's wait and see the details about JK's attachment to Intel. Will it be like his previous work? Will it be a more permanent assignment?
It's funny how like someone is acting all betrayed like the top player in his favorite football team just left to join the opposite part of the same town.
I don't want to downplay the graphical performance of Ryzen APUs, because they are great for the money, however there is no real higher performance IGPU alternative.
To make my opinion even more clear on this news, I like competition in markets more than anything else. I dislike monopolies or anticonsumer practices. Keller's work designing Zen core was great and helped AMD regain market share and forced Intel bring higher value cpus in market for less money as a response. If Keller works on a next gen CPU arch, that means that Intel recognised that Zen core has the potential to surpass their arch and need to make something even better. I wonder what is bad in my opinion that forced you to comment aggressively? Fanboy triggered maybe or what?
We don't know that (though AMD fans seem to get off at the thought of Intel seeing AMD as a threat) and it's already been posted here that Jim was most likely hired to resuscitate Intel's SoC line.
In the meantime, straight from the source: newsroom.intel.com/news-releases/jim-keller-joins-intel-lead-silicon-engineering/
It starts with SoC, but it goes to mention "the future of CPUs, GPUs, accelerators and other products for the data-centric computing era" further down. So yeah...
As for the facts that led me to my previous assumption are:
1) Zen core designed by Keller managed to greatly closed the gap to Intel's arch in a single gen.
2) Keller has done the same thing in the past with another AMD arch and helped them to even surpass Intel back then in its finest iteration later.
3) Intel's arch is stagnated for many years now with no signs at all that this is about to change soon enough to make them leapfrog AMD again if Zen 2 surpass them which isn't impossible imho (history to be repeated again maybe?).
The facts mentioned above seem enough for Intel to sign the cpu arch "magician" me thinks.
Intel doesn't need Keller to leapfrog AMD, they just didn't do it in the past years because they didn't feel AMD could even begin to compete, but now it's a different story.
This Keller guy sounds like he'll only join something that thrills him personally and professionally, it happened twice with AMD, it happened with Tesla, and now it's happening with intel.What the hell? I just noticed this, that part of the comment wasn't referred to you honestly, why would it? Also i'm no fanboy, never will be.
SoCs on the other hand, is a growing market Intel has no say in. That's why I'm inclined to believe that will be Jim's task. But as you have pointed out, it will be years till we see how it pans out. And if I may add, even then we won't be sure how much of it was Jim's doing and how much Intel's in-house know-how.
Bottomline, let's wish Jim best of luck (this may be his last deed before retirement) and enjoy new product when they come out.
"Intel needs new arch to compete with upcoming Zen 2 on 7nm "Now that you said that, my comment is invalid also. I wrote that because you quoted my comment and wrote: "It's funny how like someone is acting all betrayed like the top player in his favorite football team just left to join the opposite part of the same town."
Cheers! :toast:
As for 7nm for next Ryzen, they will be made from TSMC or GF, not AMD themselves. And Intel is on the 14nm for 3-4 years now and have been out of their schedule for 10nm 3 times already since 2015. And last news are that they will bring to the market the first of their 10nm products (low power ones as usual) in 2019. So, it is possible enough that Ryzen gen 2 on 7nm will come out before Intel 7nm cpus.