[cepth]

What makes this more bizarre than Keller’s typical short stints at previous companies is that he has done a ton of media in the last year. He’s probably given more time to journalists/interviewers in 2020 than in the previous 3 decades of his career combined.

A Fortune piece from May of this year gave some insights into his plans (as well as provided a nice overview of his career) (https://fortune.com/longform/microchip-designer-jim-keller-i...).

> Keller won’t talk much about the massive chip redesign he’s overseeing—chip designers seldom do—and Intel’s new chip probably won’t be ready for another year or two. Still, both Intel and Keller have scattered some clues about how the chips might work. The new chips will cleanly separate major functions, to make it easier for the company to improve one section at a time—an approach that evokes the chiplet model Keller used at AMD. Keller also hints that Intel’s low-power Atom line of chips may figure more prominently in his future designs for PCs and servers.

It doesn’t sound like at press time he was planning to leave.

Keller also did a great interview on Lex Fridman’s podcast, which was released in February of this year (https://youtu.be/Nb2tebYAaOA).

Keller then did a presentation at the Matroid conference (held at the end of February) (https://youtu.be/8eT1jaHmlx8).

I hope he’s ok, since the Intel statement specifically mentioned “personal reasons”.

[Traster]

His personal reasons may well include that he "personally hates working at Intel"

[rathel]

Oh yeah. I have friends who work or have worked at Intel.

Management who runs this company are straight lunatics. The sheer amount of shelved projects, pointless reorgs, layoffs-for-show is staggering.

I do work in a corp, but thanks God our leadership is much more down-to-earth, even if I earn less money, I am able to retain relative sanity (due to my allergy to bullshit).

[chooseaname]

Could be that they brought him in for his expertise and then didn't let him use that expertise. Bad management has a way of doing that.

[UncleOxidant]

He was brought in not only for his expertise but in hopes that he could reform a sclerotic design process that's stuck in the 90s. AMD, Apple and Tesla (places Keller was before Intel) use a lot more design automation and thus are able to get more done/engineer. Intel has a patchwork of tools that are generally internally developed (and thus no one outside of Intel has expertise with those tools and expertise with those tools is not transferrable outside of Intel either) and different design groups have their preferred tools. From what I gather Keller was trying to bring in more industry EDA tools and standardize the design process between groups as well. From what I hear from people who were there he ran into all sorts of push back. So I gather he's decided to cut his losses and leave Intel to languish.

[graycat]

Being around big tech companies for years, for an explanation of what's going on it's easy to guess that maybe at Intel there is a status quo in practice solidly in charge that, in particular, believes that Moore's law is sick if not yet actually dead and, thus, wants to stretch out how much longer Intel can get good revenue with a sick or dead Moore's law.

Then for Keller and Intel, here is a possibility: Have the status quo at Intel bring in Keller and then ignore him so that (i) being at Intel he won't be doing things at a competitor that hurts Intel and its status quo, (ii) being ignored he won't be able to change the status quo at Intel, and (iii) being at Intel and ignored his career will stagnate so that in the future he will be no more threat to the Intel status quo.

That is, maybe the Intel status quo competes with people down the hall -- not the first case of that -- by ignoring them and for a chip architect competes with him by bringing him into Intel so that they can ignore him.

Broadly a new direction for him might be to quit being an employee, e.g., fighting the politics of the status quo, and start being an employer as a CEO of his own startup.

Quite broadly in the US, one of the keys to progress is to have lots of startups to get around whatever organizational dysfunction exists in older companies.

One of the reasons for this situation is the propensity of BoD members to be conservative, that is, risk adverse, to pay attention to the definite and well known bird in the hand, even if it is getting sick, and ignore the not well known and risky birds in the bush. In particular, such a BoD wants a CEO who just does a good job managing the existing business. Typically a BoD won't fire a CEO for failing to get new products into new markets but might fire a CEO who spends $100 million pursuing something new that fails. So, lots of CEOs just stay with the bird in the hand.

[ncmncm]

Indeed, suppressing upsets to the status quo was always a major purpose of corporate research labs like IBM Watson Labs, same Xerox, Bell, Kodak.

Corporate would spend any amount patenting things, but shelve every single thing. Innovation upsets the gravy train. So as long as you are on top of the market, change is inherently bad. Even a whole new, unrelated product line competes with existing products if a customer for both might be the same company.

A co-worker once sat listening to execs from EMC chatting about competitive threats: uniquely from other divisions of EMC. With 80% margins on existing product, nothing new looks attractive, nothing outside the company is competition, and it doesn't even matter what outsiders hear.

Such a company also benefits from buying up apparently competing companies and disbanding them or jacking up their prices to match. In the '80s, Mentor Graphics's business model depended on buying and shuttering Cadence-like companies. Cadence was the first one too big to do that to, and MG finally had to figure out another business when the gravy train dried up. They collected lots of rent until then, and the managers left flush and found other crooked opportunities.

It's easy to spot other companies in similar positions, past and present.

[graycat]

Yup, from my experience at one of the organizations you mentioned, I have to "agree with you more than you agree with yourself". Well put.

[phlakaton]

I find it interesting that (as of this point) comments that speculate on health are downvoted, but comments that speculate on his relationship with management are not...

[vulcan01]

People tend to empathise with that which is more relevant to their own lives; more people will have a bad relationship with management than bad health.

[phlakaton]

Spoken like a young person who will no doubt live forever. ;-)

[UncleOxidant]

Why not both? Bad management can lead to bad health. But I don't think it was only management - it was the rank and file that didn't want to change as well. Trying to fight an entrenched system could definitely lead to illness.

[monadic2]

Why is that interesting? Seems like normal, on topic behavior.

[UncleOxidant]

He was brought in to try to modernize Intel's processor design process. To bring it into the 21st century. AMD and Apple (places where he'd been before) use a lot more design automation and thus are able to produce much more per engineer than Intel. Intel tends to throw more bodies at the problem which doesn't scale well. From what I've heard from people there he ran into too much institutional inertia and outright pushback. If Keller couldn't do it then Intel is just going to remain stuck.

[rathel]

Might be true, recently there have been highly boasted improvements in the RTL-to-GDSII pipeline, using AI, as one does. Both from Cadence and Synopsys.

[bredren]

Big company, but having worked at and for Intel I would not be surprised. I don’t have nice things to say about Intel.

[UncleOxidant]

Same here. It's a terrible place if you want to try to get things done. Meetings about meetings and nobody ever wants to make a decision.

[libertine]

When you have FU money and the expertise to be desired by anyone, doesn't seem like a bad reason.

[hitpointdrew]

> and the expertise to be desired by anyone

Seriously...Jim Keller doesn't apply to work places....places seek him out. The interview process is Jim interviewing the company, not the other way around.

[mabbo]

There's something I can really respect about that, if that is the case. Imagine you hate working for your company, but you're still going out, giving positive interviews, and doing your job well.

I know a lot of folks (almost certainly myself included) who struggle to not make it obvious when they loathe coming to work in the morning.

[toast0]

One of my jobs, I was interviewing candidates on my last week. It was all fine, until the candidate asked "Why do you like to work on this team?" ... luckily we were at the end of time, so I could duck the question.

[pkulak]

That's insane that they had you doing interviews when they knew you were leaving.

[toast0]

Smallish team, I was good at interviews, and not disgruntled, sort of made sense? We had a quick feedback loop, so we would make our decision day of or next day.

This candidate was great, and from what I heard, she got an offer from my team and another team at the same company, but chose the other one; I probably didn't sell the position well enough?

Anyway, not the most insane thing Yahoo was doing at the time, lol.

[ashtonkem]

I got put on call during my last week once. My comment was “are you sure?”

[jstimpfle]

> Keller also did a great interview on Lex Fridman’s podcast, which was released in February of this year (https://youtu.be/Nb2tebYAaOA).

This is great. I'm 12 minutes in and I'm getting the kicks from the way this guy describes concepts (that I already know, more or less) in a simple way.

[lozaning]

The whole video is wonderful, really shows you how smart of a person Jim is, and as always Lex is a great interviewer.

[stupidcar]

Maybe the reason he was doing so much media was because he was encountering resistance to his ideas internally at Intel. Talking publicly about them and becoming the public face of Intel's CPU design program might have been his way to get more intellectual leverage. If it was, I guess it didn't work.

[cepth]

I can’t speak specifically to Intel, but at most large private companies when you’re an employee you give up the rights to talk to media/press about your work without employer approval.

For the Fortune and Lex Fridman interviews, Keller would likely have had to get Intel PR’s approval to participate. In Lex’s interview, you can see him wearing an Intel guest badge, so I assume the interview took place on-site.

[UncleOxidant]

Just listening to that Lex Fridman podcast. Keller is a very good explainer. However, I'm on the part where he says that you need to throw everything out every 5 years or so and rewrite and it makes me think that that would be an area where he would've gotten a lot of push-back at Intel.

[baybal2]

I heard that he had a speech impediment before. Never felt that he did when I first saw him speaking on hot chips.

[SuoDuanDao]

Hm, I remember a highly requested Joe Rogan guest talking about how he got over a speech impediment. Wonder whether there's a connection.

[bArray]

I've known quite a few friends and some family with speech impediments (maybe there's something in the water), but they all seem to do much better when they are in their wheel-house. I guess that public speaking on topics you are comfortable with could be quite positive. One of my family members was able to remove it entirely, he became a chef and was required to shout orders a lot.

[wand3r]

Stamets?

[SuoDuanDao]

That's the one.

Making my predictions for 2020, I thought that co-operation with fungal systems would slowly ramp up this year. Probably just that I'm looking for evidence I was right, but it's a fun connection to draw about someone who seems in some way at least adjacent to that scene.

[Pietertje]

Just wow, listening to the podcast interview is super interesting. The abstraction and knowledge on so many different levels and topics is thrilling.

Any other tips for interviews with similar architects?

[cepth]

There have been a couple others that come to mind.

With the CEO of Cerebras (a buzzy and well-funded chip startup) on the ARK Invest podcast: https://ark-invest.com/podcast/cerebras-wafer-scale-engine-a.... I will say that the interviewee here was a little bit more coy, and the podcast generally is geared more towards a business audience, though they have had very top tier technical talent on.

Also from ARK Invest was this discussion of the just launched Nvidia A100 GPUs: https://ark-invest.com/podcast/fyi-ep67-nvidia-gpu/.

From the Matroid conference, the chief architect at Groq (another buzzy chip startup): https://youtu.be/q-lBj49iF9w