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.<p>A Fortune piece from May of this year gave some insights into his plans (as well as provided a nice overview of his career) (<a href="https://fortune.com/longform/microchip-designer-jim-keller-intel-fortune-500-apple-tesla-amd/" rel="nofollow">https://fortune.com/longform/microchip-designer-jim-keller-i...</a>).<p>> 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.<p>It doesn’t sound like at press time he was planning to leave.<p>Keller also did a great interview on Lex Fridman’s podcast, which was released in February of this year (<a href="https://youtu.be/Nb2tebYAaOA" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/Nb2tebYAaOA</a>).<p>Keller then did a presentation at the Matroid conference (held at the end of February) (<a href="https://youtu.be/8eT1jaHmlx8" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/8eT1jaHmlx8</a>).<p>I hope he’s ok, since the Intel statement specifically mentioned “personal reasons”.
How could one person be so important at CPU development?<p>We have no doubt he is one of the best player in the field from the history. But doesn't the huge project like CPU development require a lot of good workers rather than one genius?
Intel seems to be going through some tough times and I wonder if this will have long-term effects in the tech industry. The x86 monopoly makes it difficult to find a viable alternatives quickly, and I think a massive shift to ARM will likely cause similar problems in the future.<p>How can we make software more interoperable with hardware? Is moving to open instruction sets like RISC-V advisable from an economic and innovation point of view?
Is it me or are the comments on the article super weird? I've never seen an AnandTech comment section like this one. What's going on, why this one?
Wonder if it's got anything to do with Apple potentially announcing they're moving computers to their own ARM chips, Microsoft is probably doing the same, and Google and Amazon and other large players has already started creating their own CPUs too.. Wonder where this leaves Intel for the future?
When I left my previous job I had to sign a 2-year agreement to not work for a competitor company.<p>How come he can leave AMD to work for INTEL and do exactly what he did in AMD i.e design a new cpu tech?<p>Isn’t that not-permitted in intellectual jobs?
"Check our this great content before you leave" ... anyone else sick of websites stuffing an exit interstitial in your browser history, just in case you try and use the back button to leave?<p>Obnoxious for Anandtech to start doing this too. Is this a new technique? A company?
I always wondered about single individuals having an out-sized impact in tech. It is usually system/teams which make things happen. I am skeptical when one person is given most of the credit, and ignore all nameless minions who toil long hours to do the real work. Curious to hear others' perspectives on this.
This is slightly off topic, but is anyone else noticing that when this page loads, your speakers begin to play background static? After multiple reloads, I _think_ it correlates with one of the ads loading.<p>I'm wondering (at the risk of being paranoid) why on earth an ad would have your laptop broadcast static.
At Intel it's a fab process company not a computer architecture company they had huge computer architect Layoffs a few years ago when the marketing army infested upper management it seems like the fab lazybots have canned Intel's last best hope...
So - Resigned for health reasons effective immediately, but then he's going to continue being a consultant for 6 months? Must be some fairly particular health reasons... I genuinely hope he's OK.<p>IMO, if it was health reasons and he still wanted to continue working for Intel, Jim would have simply arranged for some alternative working setup - more remote, email collab, different hours, a few weeks off, etc. None of these would typically provoke the need for an official resignation & press release.