llien
Member
JK:
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’.
With Zen, we were going to catch up in one generation. There were three groups of people - a small group believed it (that Zen would catch Intel in one generation); a medium-sized group of people that thought if it happens, it would be cool; then another group that definitely believed it was impossible. A lot of those people laughed, and some of them kind of soldiered on, despite this belief. There was a lot of cognitive dissonance, but I found all kinds of people that were really enthusiastic.
Mike Clark was the architect of Zen, and I made this list of things we wanted to do [for Zen]. I said to Mike that if we did this it would be great, so why don’t we do it? He said that AMD could do it. My response was to ask why aren't we doing it - he said that everybody else says it would be impossible. I took care of that part. It wasn’t just me, there were lots of people involved in Zen, but it was also about getting people out of the way that were blocking it. It was fun – as I’ve said before, computer design needs to be fun. I try to get people jazzed up about what we’re doing. I did all kinds of crazy stuff to get people out of that kind of desultory hopelessness that they were falling into.
Entire interview on anandtech (which is actually about the ML chip startup where he's a CTO and major investor)
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’.
With Zen, we were going to catch up in one generation. There were three groups of people - a small group believed it (that Zen would catch Intel in one generation); a medium-sized group of people that thought if it happens, it would be cool; then another group that definitely believed it was impossible. A lot of those people laughed, and some of them kind of soldiered on, despite this belief. There was a lot of cognitive dissonance, but I found all kinds of people that were really enthusiastic.
Mike Clark was the architect of Zen, and I made this list of things we wanted to do [for Zen]. I said to Mike that if we did this it would be great, so why don’t we do it? He said that AMD could do it. My response was to ask why aren't we doing it - he said that everybody else says it would be impossible. I took care of that part. It wasn’t just me, there were lots of people involved in Zen, but it was also about getting people out of the way that were blocking it. It was fun – as I’ve said before, computer design needs to be fun. I try to get people jazzed up about what we’re doing. I did all kinds of crazy stuff to get people out of that kind of desultory hopelessness that they were falling into.
Entire interview on anandtech (which is actually about the ML chip startup where he's a CTO and major investor)