Re:Intel to license x86 CPU cores for use in custom processors
by hardware2win on Wednesday April 19, 2023 @07:24AM
(#35626852)
This?
>C: A few people consider you 'The Father of Zen', do you think you’d scribe to that position? Or should that go to somebody else?
JK: Perhaps one of the uncles. There were a lot of really great people on Zen. There was a methodology team that was worldwide, the SoC team was partly in Austin and partly in India, the floating-point cache was done in Colorado, the core execution front end was in Austin, the Arm front end was in Sunnyvale, and we had good technical leaders. I was in daily communication for a while with Suzanne Plummer and Steve Hale, who kind of built the front end of the Zen core, and the Colorado team. It was really good people. Mike Clark's a great architect, so we had a lot of fun, and success. Success has a lot of authors - failure has one. So that was a success. Then some teams stepped up - we moved Excavator to the Boston team, where they took over finishing the design and the physical stuff, Harry Fair and his guys did a great job on that. So there were some fairly stressful organizational changes that we did, going through that. The team all came together, so I think there was a lot of camaraderie in it. So I won't claim to be the ‘father’ - I was brought in, you know, as the instigator and the chief nudge, but part architect part transformational leader. That was fun.
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>Perhaps the modern CPU design space looks a bit like what compilers look like today, with a core that's independent of the front end language/back end target architecture. In which case it might be a lot more modular than one would expect...
Well, to be fair thats how you should design software (thus firmware too) stuff, those are good practices.
>C: A few people consider you 'The Father of Zen', do you think you’d scribe to that position? Or should that go to somebody else?
JK: Perhaps one of the uncles. There were a lot of really great people on Zen. There was a methodology team that was worldwide, the SoC team was partly in Austin and partly in India, the floating-point cache was done in Colorado, the core execution front end was in Austin, the Arm front end was in Sunnyvale, and we had good technical leaders. I was in daily communication for a while with Suzanne Plummer and Steve Hale, who kind of built the front end of the Zen core, and the Colorado team. It was really good people. Mike Clark's a great architect, so we had a lot of fun, and success. Success has a lot of authors - failure has one. So that was a success. Then some teams stepped up - we moved Excavator to the Boston team, where they took over finishing the design and the physical stuff, Harry Fair and his guys did a great job on that. So there were some fairly stressful organizational changes that we did, going through that. The team all came together, so I think there was a lot of camaraderie in it. So I won't claim to be the ‘father’ - I was brought in, you know, as the instigator and the chief nudge, but part architect part transformational leader. That was fun.
_______
>Perhaps the modern CPU design space looks a bit like what compilers look like today, with a core that's independent of the front end language/back end target architecture. In which case it might be a lot more modular than one would expect...
Well, to be fair thats how you should design software (thus firmware too) stuff, those are good practices.