Tenstorrent interview at anandtech - golden nuggets

manux · May 27, 2021

Great interview. Contains so many funny golden nuggets and plenty of information as well

We actually split the interview into two segments. This is the first 90-minute interview transcription, on the topic of Tenstorrent with Ljubisa and Jim. There will be a second 90-minute interview to follow, on the topic of Jim Keller, next week.
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Jim Keller on how he convinced people to do Zen

JK: I wouldn't say that! The funny thing was, we knew we were kind of at the end of the road - our customers weren’t buying our products, and the stuff on the roadmap wasn’t any good. I didn’t have to convince people very much about that. There were a few people who said ‘you don’t understand Jim, we have an opportunity to make 5%’. But we were off by 2X, and we couldn’t catch up [going down that route]. So I made this chart that summarised that our plan was to ‘fall a little further behind Intel every year until we died’
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Jim Keller grilling people at intel

JK: Yeah, I don’t want to go into too many details, but when I was at Intel, people were surprised a Senior VP was grilling people on how they manage their batch queue, or what the PDK is, or what the qualification steps were, or how long the CAD flows took to run, or what the dense utilization was in the CPU, or how the register file was built. I know details about everything, and you know I care about them, I actually really care. I want them to look good.
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Jim Keller on elon musk

If you're going to be in the technology business in any way, shape, or form, and you have to get to the details. I thought I was good at that, and then I met Elon Musk. Holy crap. For him the details started at atoms. Maybe lower, I don't know. But like, what I thought was first principle thinking wasn't close to his first principle thinking, and then I got my ass kicked seriously about doing that. But it was really great, I really like to do that. I hope that when I engage with engineering teams, they start to get that engineering is fun, and the details matter, and there's an abstraction stack - there's the high level, there's the medium, and there's a low level. Yes, you do need to know a lot about all of them, because then you can figure out how to fix things. You can't fix something simple like ‘computer too slow’ - what are you going to do if it's too slow? If you could go into 1000 details, there's all kinds of stuff to do if you know the details.
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https://www.anandtech.com/show/1670...storrent-ceo-ljubisa-bajic-and-cto-jim-keller

cheapchips · May 28, 2021

Lex Friedman did a great interview with Jim Keller on a recent podcast as well.

manux · May 28, 2021

cheapchips said: ↑

Lex Friedman did a great interview with Jim Keller on a recent podcast as well.
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It was a great podcast. I'll link it here in case someone doesn't know that podcast

Tenstorrent interview at anandtech - golden nuggets

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Tenstorrent interview at anandtech - golden nuggets

manux Veteran

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Khronos Group Interview - Next Gen Graphics, Ray Tracing & Vulkan - With Neil Trevett

Interview with one of the N64's system architects: Phil Gossett

Extended Interview With Crash Bandicoot Co-Creator Andy Garvin (Ars Technica)

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Interview: Nate Wells (Thief 1, System Shock, Bioshock, SWAT 4, TLoU, etc)

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