Jim Keller: Moore’s Law, Microprocessors, Abstractions, and First Principles

Jim Keller is a legendary microprocessor engineer, having worked
at AMD, Apple, Tesla, and now Intel. He’s known for his work on
the AMD K7, K8, K12 and Zen microarchitectures, Apple A4, A5
processors, and co-author of the specifications for the x86-64
instruction set and HyperTransport interconnect.


This conversation is part of the Artificial Intelligence
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Here’s the outline of the episode. On some podcast players you
should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time.


00:00 – Introduction
02:12 – Difference between a computer and a human brain
03:43 – Computer abstraction layers and parallelism
17:53 – If you run a program multiple times, do you always get
the same answer?
20:43 – Building computers and teams of people
22:41 – Start from scratch every 5 years
30:05 – Moore’s law is not dead
55:47 – Is superintelligence the next layer of abstraction?
1:00:02 – Is the universe a computer?
1:03:00 – Ray Kurzweil and exponential improvement in
technology
1:04:33 – Elon Musk and Tesla Autopilot
1:20:51 – Lessons from working with Elon Musk
1:28:33 – Existential threats from AI
1:32:38 – Happiness and the meaning of life