- Oct 22, 2004
- 799
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Seems our intuition was pretty much right. Keller won't be credited with any architectural legacy at Intel.
Managing 10000 People at Intel
IC: I know it’s still kind of fresh, so I’m not sure what kind of NDAs you are still under, but your work at Intel - was that more of a clean slate? Can you go into any detail about what you did there?
JK: I can’t talk too much, obviously. The role I had was Senior Vice President of Silicon Engineering Group, and the team was 10,000 people. They're doing so many different things, it's just amazing. It was something like 60 or 70 SoCs is in flight at a time, literally from design to prototyping, debugging, and in production. So it was a fairly diverse group, and there my staff was vice presidents and senior fellows, so it was a big organizational thing.
I had thought I was going there because there was a bunch of new technology to go build. I spent most of my time working with the team about both organizational and methodology transformation, like new CAD tools, new methodologies, new ways to build chips. A couple of years before I joined, they started what's called the SoC IP view of building chips, versus Intel's historic monolithic view. That to be honest wasn't going well, because they took the monolithic chips, they took the great client and server parts, and simply broke it into pieces. You can't just break it into pieces - you have to actually rebuild those pieces and some of the methodology goes with it.
We found a bunch of people [internally] who were really excited about working on that, and I also spent a lot of time on IP quality, IP density, libraries, characterization, process technology. You name it, I was on it. My days were kind of wild - some days I’d have 14 different [meetings] in one day. It was just click, click, click, click, so many things going on.
IC: All those meetings, how did you get anything done?
JK: I don't get anything done technically! I got told I was the senior vice president - it's evaluation, set direction, make judgment calls, or let’s say try some organizational change, or people change. That adds up after a while. Know that the key thing about getting somewhere is to know where you are going, and then put an organization in place that knows how to do that - that takes a lot of work. So I didn't write much code, but I did send a lot of text messages.
An AnandTech Interview with Jim Keller: 'The Laziest Person at Tesla'
IC: I know it’s still kind of fresh, so I’m not sure what kind of NDAs you are still under, but your work at Intel - was that more of a clean slate? Can you go into any detail about what you did there?
JK: I can’t talk too much, obviously. The role I had was Senior Vice President of Silicon Engineering Group, and the team was 10,000 people. They're doing so many different things, it's just amazing. It was something like 60 or 70 SoCs is in flight at a time, literally from design to prototyping, debugging, and in production. So it was a fairly diverse group, and there my staff was vice presidents and senior fellows, so it was a big organizational thing.
I had thought I was going there because there was a bunch of new technology to go build. I spent most of my time working with the team about both organizational and methodology transformation, like new CAD tools, new methodologies, new ways to build chips. A couple of years before I joined, they started what's called the SoC IP view of building chips, versus Intel's historic monolithic view. That to be honest wasn't going well, because they took the monolithic chips, they took the great client and server parts, and simply broke it into pieces. You can't just break it into pieces - you have to actually rebuild those pieces and some of the methodology goes with it.
We found a bunch of people [internally] who were really excited about working on that, and I also spent a lot of time on IP quality, IP density, libraries, characterization, process technology. You name it, I was on it. My days were kind of wild - some days I’d have 14 different [meetings] in one day. It was just click, click, click, click, so many things going on.
IC: All those meetings, how did you get anything done?
JK: I don't get anything done technically! I got told I was the senior vice president - it's evaluation, set direction, make judgment calls, or let’s say try some organizational change, or people change. That adds up after a while. Know that the key thing about getting somewhere is to know where you are going, and then put an organization in place that knows how to do that - that takes a lot of work. So I didn't write much code, but I did send a lot of text messages.
An AnandTech Interview with Jim Keller: 'The Laziest Person at Tesla'
PS. The interview also highlights very well his achievements in turning around AMD CPU design — something for which he deserves a lot of credit, even though the Zen chief architect is AMD Corporate Fellow Mike Clark. Clark has largely subsumed Keller's previous role at AMD, it seems, now being responsible for "CPU core strategy, design and roadmap".
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