Jim Keller Resigns From Intel, Effective Immediately

[IntMD]

https://www.anandtech.com/show/15846/jim-keller-resigns-from-intel-effective-immediately

 

https://newsroom.intel.com/news-releases/changes-intels-technology-systems-architecture-client-group/#gs.7vmqsx

 

So, the legend and myth of Jim Keller, has resigned from Intel, effective immediately (as per 11th June), apparently due to personal reasons, but is going to continue with them as a consultant for six months. Hopefully it's actually nothing bad personally, and more of an 'I can't deal with you anymore' type thing for him. It'll be interesting where he springs up next. Sounds like it might be a fairly large reorganisation for Intel too. 

 

 

Intel Press Release:

Quote

SANTA CLARA, Calif., June 11, 2020 – Today, Intel announced that Jim Keller has resigned effective June 11, 2020, due to personal reasons. Intel appreciates Mr. Keller’s work over the past two years helping them continue advancing Intel’s product leadership and they wish him and his family all the best for the future. 

 

Intel is pleased to announce, however, that Mr. Keller has agreed to serve as a consultant for six months to assist with the transition.

 

Intel has a vastly experienced team of technical leaders within its Technology, Systems Architecture and Client Group (TSCG) under the leadership of Dr. Venkata (Murthy) Renduchintala, group president of TSCG and chief engineering officer. As part of this transition, the following leadership changes will be made, effective immediately:

• Sundari Mitra, the former CEO and founder of NetSpeed Systems and the current leader of Intel’s Configurable Intellectual Property and Chassis Group, will lead a newly created IP Engineering Group focused on developing best-in-class IP.
• Gene Scuteri, an accomplished engineering leader in the semiconductor industry, will head the Xeon and Networking Engineering Group.
• Daaman Hejmadi will return to leading the Client Engineering Group focused on system-on-chip (SoC) execution and designing next-generation client, device and chipset products. Hejmadi has over two decades of experience leading teams delivering advanced SoCs both inside and outside of Intel.
• Navid Shahriari, an experienced Intel leader, will continue to lead the Manufacturing and Product Engineering Group, which is focused on delivering comprehensive pre-production test suites and component debug capabilities to enable high-quality, high-volume manufacturing.

Intel congratulates Sundari, Gene, Daaman and Navid as we begin the next phase of our world-class engineering organization and look forward to executing on our exciting roadmap of products.

 

Anandtech Article:

 

Quote

Jim Keller was hired by Intel two years ago to the role as Senior Vice President of Intel’s Silicon Engineering Group, after a string of successes at Tesla, AMD, Apple, AMD (again), and PA Semiconductor. As far as we understand, Jim’s goal inside Intel was to streamline a lot of the product development process on the silicon side, as well as providing strategic platforms though which future products can be developed and optimized to market. We also believe that Jim Keller has had a hand in looking at Intel’s manufacturing processes, as well as a number of future products.

Quote

Jim Keller’s history in the industry has been well documented – his work has had a significant effect in a number of areas that have propelled the industry forward. This includes work on Apple’s A4 and A5 processors, AMD’s K8 and Zen high-level designs, as well as Tesla’s custom silicon for self driving which analysts have Tesla’s competitors have said put the company up to seven years ahead....

...Jim’s history has shown that he likes to spend a few years at a company and move on to different sorts of challenges. His two year stint at Intel has been one of his shortest tenures, and even recently Forbes published a deep expose on Jim, stating that ‘Intel is betting its chips on microprocessor mastermind Jim Keller’. So the fact that he is leaving relatively early based on his previous roles is somewhat different.

Intel’s press release on the matter suggests that this has been known about for enough time to rearrange some of the working groups around to cover Jim’s role. Jim will be serving at Intel for at least another six months it seems, in the role of a consultant, so it might be that long before he lands another spot in the industry.

 

[5x5]

Guess he couldn't design the correct security hole

[Drama Lama]

Hope intel doesn’t suffer from that because AMD will become the next intel if intel does not catch up

[Fasauceome]

Just now, Drama Lama said:

If AMD went on a complete price war they would loose it because Intel has their own fabs and could produce much cheaper 

I'm not sure what you mean by this. AMD is currently winning based on price, Intel is winning on performance.

 

Having your own fabs doesn't mean cheaper. Especially because of Intel's 14nm shortage that never went away, they've had to outsource their production and repurpose old fabs.

[Drama Lama]

2 minutes ago, Fasauceome said:

I'm not sure what you mean by this. AMD is currently winning based on price, Intel is winning on performance.

 

Having your own fabs doesn't mean cheaper. Especially because of Intel's 14nm shortage that never went away, they've had to outsource their production and repurpose old fabs.

With price war I mean trying to just compete by price

do you know how expensive an i7 9700 is to produce ?

[D13H4RD]

I don't think this is a cause for concern just yet, given that Keller doesn't stay in one ship for very long. His brief stint at AMD lasted about 3 years, presumably as an advisor to help the development of Zen and moved to Tesla before Intel. 

 

However, I also partially think that Bob Swan's statement of "benchmarks don't matter" may have played a role in his departure. Then again, his role at Intel is comparatively smaller, being moreso to help streamline future product development. 

[5x5]

14 minutes ago, D13H4RD said:

I don't think this is a cause for concern just yet, given that Keller doesn't stay in one ship for very long. His brief stint at AMD lasted about 3 years, presumably as an advisor to help the development of Zen and moved to Tesla before Intel. 

 

However, I also partially think that Bob Swan's statement of "benchmarks don't matter" may have played a role in his departure. Then again, his role at Intel is comparatively smaller, being moreso to help streamline future product development. 

Guess he wasn't allowed to benchmark his corporate benefits so he left in search of better ones

[RejZoR]

Usually when Jim Keller leaves a company, it means his job was done there. Every time he left AMD they released spectacular products. Spectacular Intel CPU soon? Hm

[IntMD]

4 minutes ago, RejZoR said:

Usually when Jim Keller leaves a company, it means his job was done there. Every time he left AMD they released spectacular products. Spectacular Intel CPU soon? Hm

You would kind of hope, but the way the Intel press release was worded makes me think it either really is a personal reason (hopefully not too bad if so) or there were disagreements on future direction that he might have not been on board with.

[Drama Lama]

7 minutes ago, RejZoR said:

Usually when Jim Keller leaves a company, it means his job was done there. Every time he left AMD they released spectacular products. Spectacular Intel CPU soon? Hm

Intel‘s main problem why AMD is so successful is not their chip design but their manufacturing process ( of course all the security issues are also important but not the main reasons)

[5x5]

27 minutes ago, RejZoR said:

Usually when Jim Keller leaves a company, it means his job was done there. Every time he left AMD they released spectacular products. Spectacular Intel CPU soon? Hm

Thing is, when that happens he doesn't leave abruptly with corporate statements that read like damage control

[Tieox]

I presume he quit because someone has pushed through the RGB cpu lid.

 

 

[5x5]

9 minutes ago, VegetableStu said:

"Jim, what are you doing?"

"uhh... i'm... charting out.... benefits of... it's just for fun, i swear, i'm not leaving right now"

"WHAT DID I SAY?!"

"*ulp*"

"NO BENCHMARKS"

"You will take these benefits up the poopshoot and like it" - Uncle Bob

[MageTank]

This seems pretty much normal for Keller. Looking at his career history, some of his longest employment lasted only 4-5 years before he went elsewhere. He has even described himself as nomadic in interviews, and considers himself a "fixer". Whether Intel simply worded things poorly when they chose to use "personal reasons" instead of "pursue other opportunities" or if something went sour internally, we will likely never know.

[RejZoR]

19 minutes ago, MageTank said:

This seems pretty much normal for Keller. Looking at his career history, some of his longest employment lasted only 4-5 years before he went elsewhere. He has even described himself as nomadic in interviews, and considers himself a "fixer". Whether Intel simply worded things poorly when they chose to use "personal reasons" instead of "pursue other opportunities" or if something went sour internally, we will likely never know.

I think he likes serious challenges, which is why he mostly takes the hardest jobs of recovering market segments for companies.

[Drama Lama]

3 minutes ago, RejZoR said:

I think he likes serious challenges, which is why he mostly takes the hardest jobs of recovering market segments for companies.

Maybe Intel will have to go the same stony way as AMD did

[paeschli]

Assuming he doesn't retire, where does he end up next? Apple for the ARM MacBooks? Back to AMD? Working for ARM or Qualcomm?

[marldorthegreat]

1 hour ago, Drama Lama said:

If AMD went on a complete price war they would loose it because Intel has their own fabs and could produce much cheaper 

It's not just price though, AMD's zen chiplets are small meaning they can be more easily mass produced. Intel's dies are much larger so you get much fewer per wafer. Yes Intel is on a (very) mature node.

But AMD's chiplet design means that pretty much (I know it's a lot more complicated) they just need to have one 8 core chiplet design which scales from top to bottom. Which means costs are spread across almost every CPU.

[GOTSpectrum]

2 minutes ago, paeschli said:

Assuming he doesn't retire, where does he end up next? Apple for the ARM MacBooks? Back to AMD? Working for ARM or Qualcomm?

I'd really like t see him do some work on RISC-V personally. I feel like he could really push that dev through and get some nice uplift on their architecture. But we know that probably won't happen. The man likes to go where he is working hard against the odds, seeing as he isn't really a GPU architect(RTG could really use a Jim Keller) I think he has a number of places. He's worked for apple before, I could see him liking the challenge of creating massive ARM chips for apple, especially if they want to take it wide AF. Qualcomm have been looking to improve trying to catch up with apple since Jim assisted apple with their processors so that is certainly an option. Hell, maybe somewhere we don't even think about like IBM or somewhere looking to do some AI stuff. Will be interesting to see in the next 6 months if he gets back into play where he ends up. 

[leadeater]

1 hour ago, RejZoR said:

Usually when Jim Keller leaves a company, it means his job was done there. Every time he left AMD they released spectacular products. Spectacular Intel CPU soon? Hm

Or a smart person knows when to jump off a sinking ship 

 

More seriously it's also just as likely he's not seeing the product vision he was hoping for and not making the progress he would expect so is off to find another more fulfilling role. He's the type of person who has no obligation to stick around nor a need to so as long as he's not damaging his reputation leaving in such a situation it's in his best interest and that is something everyone should be able to do, just not everyone is in the position and has the ability to do so.

[GOTSpectrum]

5 minutes ago, marldorthegreat said:

It's not just price though, AMD's zen chiplets are small meaning they can be more easily mass produced. Intel's dies are much larger so you get much fewer per wafer. Yes Intel is on a (very) mature node.

But AMD's chiplet design means that pretty much (I know it's a lot more complicated) they just need to have one 8 core chiplet design which scales from top to bottom. Which means costs are spread across almost every CPU.

Not only that but by having many small chips they are re reducing the die area that is 'lost' to defects. If you have a catastrophe defect on an Intel 16 core core processor you loose the entire product, which can be a massive blow. AMD chiplets on the other hand lose less than 80mm^2. Thats a pretty big difference. Even if the defect density is rather low on 14nm+++(++++++++++++++)

 

I hope intel keep pace, don't want them on top for a few more years, gotta let AMD build some market share and cash reserves; otherwise we are just gonna see more stagnation. 

[LukaH]

he left AMD before Zen was officially released too.... so maybe his job at Intel is done? But if i recall correctly at that time they announced that the Zen design has been tapped out already so there is that.

[Vishera]

4 hours ago, RejZoR said:

Usually when Jim Keller leaves a company, it means his job was done there. Every time he left AMD they released spectacular products. Spectacular Intel CPU soon? Hm

He is a freelancer,and if he isn't happy about something he has the right to quit.

[leadeater]

45 minutes ago, LukaH said:

he left AMD before Zen was officially released too.... so maybe his job at Intel is done? But if i recall correctly at that time they announced that the Zen design has been tapped out already so there is that.

His resignation was announced after/along with AMD statement that he had completed the design work and future development road map he was hired for so there is a slight difference, but Intel isn't as forthcoming with information so anybodies guess.

[5x5]

Just now, leadeater said:

His resignation was announce after/along with AMD statement that he had completed the design work and future development road map he was hired for so there is a slight difference, but Intel isn't as forthcoming with information so anybodies guess.

Maybe he left in order to design a better water chiller for the next intel stock cooler?