IC: So the two of you met together at AMD, working on projects together. I’ll start with you Jim, what was your first impression of Ljubisa working with him?
JK: Ljubisa is a big hulking guy, so we’re in this meeting and you know, all these nerdy engineers are talking and there’s Ljubisa saying this is how we should do stuff. He has, let’s say, a fairly forceful personality and he’d done a whole bunch of work on improving power efficiency of GPUs. When he first proposed that work, there was a bit of pushback, and then he slowly worked it out and he was right. I think Raja Koduri actually told him later on that a lot of the power/performance improvement they got came from the work he did.
Then he took over the team of software power management and system management, which had been sort of put together from a couple of different groups and it wasn’t very functional. Then he did a fairly significant transformation of that in terms of the charter, and also effectiveness. So I was kind of watching this go on.
When I was at AMD, the products they had (at the time) weren’t very good, and we literally canceled everything they were doing and restructured stuff and created a bunch of clean slate opportunities. Zen was, at the top level, literally a clean slate design. We reset the CAD flows, Ljubisa was resetting the power management strategy and a couple of other things, so he was one of my partners in crime in terms of changing how we do stuff. I don’t think you were a senior fellow, I found the best senior fellows at AMD, at least I thought they were the best, and they worked for me. I had a little gang, and then Ljubisa joined that gang, because everybody said he’s one of us. That was pretty cool, and then together we could basically get any technical problem moving because we had pretty good alignment, so that was really fun.
IC: Same question to you Ljubisa. Jim is a well-known name in the industry for semiconductor design, and he came into AMD kind of laying down the hammer – to rip everything up and start a clean slate. What was your impression of him at that point?
LB: On my second chart at AMD, I re-joined the company having explicitly decided that I was going to essentially apply whatever energy I’ve got into fixing everything in my sight, and balk at nothing. I joined with that mindset, and I didn’t know Jim at the time. But pretty quickly we intersected and also it became pretty clear to me that on my own, regardless of my enthusiasm and design to make a lot of impact, it was going to be difficult to get around all the obstacles that you generally come upon when you want to affect a lot of change in an organization of that size.
My first impression was that Jim was essentially absolutely bulldozing (Ian: Ha!) through anything that you could characterize as any kind of obstacle, whether it was like organizational or technical, like literally every problem that would land in front of him, he would just sort of drive right over it with what seemed like no sort of slowdown whatsoever. So given my disposition of what he was already doing, I think that’s ultimately, at least a part of, what led us getting into alignment so quickly and me getting into this group that Jim just mentioned.
I wasn’t a Senior Fellow, I was actually a director - everybody at the time kept saying that nobody understands why I’m only a director and why am I not a fellow, or a senior fellow. That was a common theme there, but I guess I fit in more with these technical folks and they said there are a lot of organizational challenges to getting anything serious done. I thought that it was better [for me to be] positioned somewhere you have a bit of reach into both.
For me the biggest initial impression was that Jim enabled everything that I wanted to do, and basically recognized and he did this for anybody that was in his orbit. He’s extremely good at picking people that can get stuff done versus people that can’t, and then essentially giving them whatever backing they need to do that.
As we started together, he started giving me all sorts of random advice. A story that I’ve mentioned before is that we had a meeting in Austin one time, and I was supposed to fly on Tuesday morning. I went to check-in early and realized that I had booked the ticket for a week earlier. So I never went to the airport, I never had a hotel, I didn’t have a flight. I called up Jim and I said ‘I got to buy another ticket and I can’t go through the corporate systems because I need to buy it now and the flight is 6am the next morning’. So he goes ‘yeah, you should really watch out for that - you’re kind of too young for this sort of behavior!’. I’ve gotten all sorts of life advice from him which I’ve felt was extremely useful and impactful for me. I’ve changed major things in the way I go about doing stuff that’s got nothing to do with computers and processors based off of Jim’s input. He’s been a huge influence – it started with work, but it goes deeper than that.
IC: Correct me if I’m wrong, but for the time inside AMD, it kind of sounded like Jim’s way or the highway?
JK: I wouldn't say that! 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.