The timeline looks about right, SA says he moved back to AMD in 2012[1], so figure 4 years to design a new core and get a few test runs in, then a year to ramp enough so you can sell said chip.

That being said, I think it has more to do with an overall culture change, the technical talent to build a good core has been at AMD this whole time. Jim Keller said as much back in 2014[2], and there is nothing special about Zen's architecture from a technical standpoint. What Zen is is a well executed conventional high performance CPU core.

By not splitting up resources like previous leadership at AMD, they were able to build a solid, competitive core. This type of investment takes 5+ years to come to fruition, from thought to test runs of silicon.

1 - https://semiaccurate.com/2012/08/01/apples-cpu-architect-jim...

2 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOTFE7sJY-Q

Well...I don't know the entire history, but only my memory...which admittedly is never an accurate source. At that time, it was stated Jim Keller was brought back to AMD specifically to work on something which became codenamed 'Zen', since AMD was getting pounded in their previous ventures(Bulldozer et al). I was excited then, then forgot, and then Ryzen was born.

Yea, he definitely came in at an interesting time, right as Lisa Su came to the fore, locking down the PS4 and Xbox One. Following this Lisa pared back the product lines so they weren't spreading their engineering talent thin, which AMD badly needed to do.

Remember that ARM Seattle core AMD announced in 2012[1], to be launched in 2014? Here we are in 2017, and its finally just becoming available in significant quantities...

Diversions like that were what was keeping AMD from putting enough engineers on the task of building a solid CPU core.

1 - https://semiaccurate.com/2012/10/30/amd-announces-an-arm64-s...

Truly brilliant for sure. Reminds me of Anders Hejlsberg who designed Typescript, Delphi, and C#.

Or Linus Torvalds with Linux, and just to prove he wasn't a one hit wonder designing Git.

I've concluded that what people fail to grasp about technology is that Einstein types still exist. There are rare engineers worth hundreds of times more than average, only this time they're well paid by their corporate masters. More like Picasso's really. Technology is a fusion of art and science, free from the normal restrictions of physics it's an engineering discipline that embraces art and elegance to a degree not seen in harder, realer disciplines.

Git was helped by Github, and being a requirement for Linux development.

Otherwise I might be enjoying Mercurial nowadays.

I AM enjoying mercurial these days. It's a joy to work with. For most git tasks I can just clone it using hg-git, and work with it just like that, and push it back to github for a PR/CI.

Let's not get ahead of ourselves there on git. _Have you tried using submodules?_ :P

I actually like submodules, maybe it suffers from the awkward-at-first perception people have about git in general.

I don't think submodules were designed by Linus.

Throw in Jobs. Original Mac (1984), iPod (iconic music players), iPhone (nuf said), iPad (launch of tablets). Musk, Edison, Bell. Really a lot of the world changing in tech is concentrated in bursts of productivity for a relative few individuals like Einstein's golden year. Of course many make significant one off contributions. But it is amazing how some just have this ability to strike gold consistently. Making it look almost routine.

Jobs was a Marketer of other peoples ideas... I love how you leave out Woz, and the Team of people that made the iPod/iPhone/iPad

Edison is renowned for taking credit for other peoples work, notably some of the work of Nikola Tesla who you also leave off your list and was one of the rare singular geniuses on the level of a Einstein

Elon Musk has a vision of his idealized world and the money to hire people that will attempt to make it happen

None of the people you list (aside from Einstein) are singular genius working on their own creating the ideas and products and I think we do a disservice to everyone when we say "Jobs invented the iPhone".

That is not to say their contributions to the projects are not important but I do believe there is some amount of Hero Worship and over inflation of their value/importance and an massive under appreciation for the 100's or 1000's of other people that actually make these ideas or products a reality

Funny, I was reading another HN thread where someone said:

"Pretty reliable rule of software is: if you think it's pointless you probably don't understand it well enough." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14987634

I think that applies to your understanding of Steve Jobs. I don't think you understand the point of Steve Jobs well enough.

A product like the iPhone isn't special because of its ideas — science fiction authors had already envisioned products like this — it's special because it actually got made.

He had a vision for what the product should be. He was able to coalesce a set of human resources into making it a reality. He took raw ideas, found the best of these ideas, insist these best ideas still suck and need to be further improved. He made people, regardless of their particular discipline, do the best work they were capable of.

Calling him a marketer is a sad joke.

> Jobs was a Marketer of other peoples ideas

That's an oversimplification. He was a marketer, true, but he also was fanatically pushing people towards standards higher than anyone else in the industry.

If there was nothing special about Jobs, how can it be Apple came up with the Mac (a somewhat just-right version of the Lisa ideas), with the iPod, the iPhone, computers that actually look good (starting with the bondi-blue iMac, which he had little to do with)? To say he only could sell other people's ideas ignore how many of these people voluntarily worked for someone with the reputation of being an insufferable asshole and pull off miracle after miracle.

If I invent a fantastic new algorithm in a space people are hamfistedly competing in, does my manager get the credit for inventing the algorithm because he pushed me, or do I?

This type of thinking makes great engineers move into other non-engineering ventures.

If your manager drove you through several iterations, pointing where your previous attempts were flawed and guiding you to the One True Implementation, then yes, your manager deserves some credit for making you implement their idea. The implementation may be yours, as well as the flawed ones, but it's the manager's idea in the end. You deserve credit for making it possible, but so does your manager.

A good manager isn't a person who tells you what to do. A good manager will help you do the best you can do. A really good one will make you do what you didn't think you could.

Let's pretend this is a journal article, if he pointed out flaws but didn't really do much else, does he end up in the list of authors at the beginning of the paper or does he end up as a thank you at the end?

It seems in this case people like Jobs end up as first author.

Why didn't the people who were actually responsible form their own company then, but rather wait for Steve come along to assemble the team and take all the credit? I also assume he made more money than them, how did so many people stand for that?

Everybody deserves credit. Your manager could have told you to work on a different problem. Are you really a better engineer than me - working for a different company in a different problem space where that algorithm isn't needed? Is it something special about you that nobody else could develop it, or is it just the circumstances put you in a place where you couldn't help but develop it? So you developed a new algorithm, are you sure that if I had tried I wouldn't have developed a better one?

Let's pretend this is a journal article, if he pointed out flaws but didn't really do much else, does he end up in the list of authors at the beginning of the paper or does he end up as a thank you at the end?

It seems in this case people like Jobs end up as first author.

The rest is irrelevant. There might be several scientists far better than me, all that matters is that I got there first. My manager could also be irrelevant as I've had technically capable managers that didn't truly do anything except put me on a project, that they hadn't known beforehand if it was even possible to do, and tell me to do it with next to zero feedback throughout the entire process.

I believe Jobs was an "editor" too. He would direct talents into improvements and pick choices. He didn't just sell something made, he was the guy who asked for it. There was many ways to design a mp3 player, some good that amazing people could have made, but only a few that became iconic like the ipod.

ps: think about Next too, that's again a Jobs only venture. He assembled the team, designed the goals, drove the people. He's not "just a salesman", he brings value into the formula. Not to say that people like Tesla weren't screwed though.

I don't think Marketeer is as a name should be diminished. Truly and brilliant excellent Marketeers are very rare and amazing to watch.

No one is trying to diminish them. The thing is, brilliant marketeers already know how to be celebrated. But finding the scientists and engineers take extra effort to notice, because they aren't naturally "loud" about it.

Wiz was never involved with a lot of the more interesting bits of Apple, he gets a lot of deserved credit for his early work but also plenty of credit for things he never worked on.

Woz is the Mozart of 8-bit computer design. His design is surprising, even breathtaking at times, but the kind of magic he did then cannot be done these days of billions of transistors per chip.

He sure seems to be very talented but Ryzen also gained from a few important patents being finally expired (the one about SMT, for example)

https://scalibq.wordpress.com/2012/02/14/the-myth-of-cmt-clu...

http://www.anandtech.com/show/11170/the-amd-zen-and-ryzen-7-...

I remember how excited I was when I heard the announcement that Keller was to work on a new project at AMD a few years back.

And I can certainly relate to the latter point: As an electronic engineer that likes to dabble with IC design, I'd love to consume some of the wisdom that the man could impart.

Along with him was Dobberpuhl, who led the DEC Alpha team that Keller was on. Dobberpuhl founded SiByte, which is the company that Keller left AMD for.

They then went on together to work at P.A. Semi, which was acquired by Apple. Dobberpuhl retired there. Keller went to AMD, and now is at Tesla.

> one man more or less moves the direction of the CPU industry: Jim Keller.

I never heard of him, and now I'm glad I did. Thank you for posting that.

Here's a link to wikipedia's article on Jim Keller:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Keller_(engineer)