Lex Fridman
8 HN recommenders · recommended in 14 months, 2020–2023
1:34:44 · 742K views · Feb 5, 2020
Lex Fridman interviews legendary chip architect Jim Keller about Moore's Law, microprocessor design, and first-principles thinking. Keller draws on his work at AMD, Apple, Tesla and Intel, discussing instruction sets, transistor budgets, and self-driving.
HN cites it whenever chip architecture, Moore's Law or CPU design comes up, as an unusually deep and accessible view from a top designer.
20 comments from Hacker News
I highly suggest viewing one of the Alpha's original designers, Jim Keller, recent chat with MIT Prof Lex Fridman this video I was stunned by Jim's total command of Computer Architecture, and his deep insights about the subject. I will never again utter the phrase 'modern computer' without requisite awe.
Jim Keller talks about his impression working with Elon - skip to 1:20:50 of this (effing amazing) interview: this video Edit: Also Jim talks about Elon’s engineering skills at 50 minutes into this interview: [LINK] Disclaimer: I’m not an Elon fan at all.
I didn't make the connection until now, but Jim Keller was on the Lex Fridman podcast twice [1, 2] and it was awesome. In terms of founders this is pretty great team. [1] this video [2] [LINK]
Loved the episodes with Jim Keller [0] and Brian Kernighan [1] as well. Lex really does a great show and has amazing guests. [0]: this video [1]: [LINK]
I just wanted to say this about Intel vs AMD. Back when Intel was the "underdog" it couldn't compete with Athlon/Opeteron CPUs from AMD with its Pentium IV line, fan boys from both sides continually escalated the armchair warfare on Slashdot and Anandtech forums when Intel finally came out with the Conroe architecture that blew the competition away. I've seen this pendulum swing from one side to the other and back. Putting Intel marketing (awful) and AMD's marketing (awful again...), and their fan bases (toxic) aside, can we acknowledge the fact that working on a computer architecture is an extraordinarily complex task and that requires brilliant people all working together? I'll defer this fascinating topic, which most software engineers and tech enthusiasts are completely and utterly unaware of, to this talk by the legendary chip designer (x86 spec coauthor, A4/A5/Zen/Tesla AI ASIC architect) - Jim Keller and his interview with Lex Fridman: this video Designing & manufacturing computer chips is hard af, having worked in semiconductor manufacturing for over 12 years (primarily on the backend side of the Fab). Edit: Redacting some specifics