I find it interesting that (as of this point) comments that speculate on health are downvoted, but comments that speculate on his relationship with management are not...

He was brought in not only for his expertise but in hopes that he could reform a sclerotic design process that's stuck in the 90s. AMD, Apple and Tesla (places Keller was before Intel) use a lot more design automation and thus are able to get more done/engineer. Intel has a patchwork of tools that are generally internally developed (and thus no one outside of Intel has expertise with those tools and expertise with those tools is not transferrable outside of Intel either) and different design groups have their preferred tools. From what I gather Keller was trying to bring in more industry EDA tools and standardize the design process between groups as well. From what I hear from people who were there he ran into all sorts of push back. So I gather he's decided to cut his losses and leave Intel to languish.

Being around big tech companies for years, for an explanation of what's going on it's easy to guess that maybe at Intel there is a status quo in practice solidly in charge that, in particular, believes that Moore's law is sick if not yet actually dead and, thus, wants to stretch out how much longer Intel can get good revenue with a sick or dead Moore's law.

Then for Keller and Intel, here is a possibility: Have the status quo at Intel bring in Keller and then ignore him so that (i) being at Intel he won't be doing things at a competitor that hurts Intel and its status quo, (ii) being ignored he won't be able to change the status quo at Intel, and (iii) being at Intel and ignored his career will stagnate so that in the future he will be no more threat to the Intel status quo.

That is, maybe the Intel status quo competes with people down the hall -- not the first case of that -- by ignoring them and for a chip architect competes with him by bringing him into Intel so that they can ignore him.

Broadly a new direction for him might be to quit being an employee, e.g., fighting the politics of the status quo, and start being an employer as a CEO of his own startup.

Quite broadly in the US, one of the keys to progress is to have lots of startups to get around whatever organizational dysfunction exists in older companies.

One of the reasons for this situation is the propensity of BoD members to be conservative, that is, risk adverse, to pay attention to the definite and well known bird in the hand, even if it is getting sick, and ignore the not well known and risky birds in the bush. In particular, such a BoD wants a CEO who just does a good job managing the existing business. Typically a BoD won't fire a CEO for failing to get new products into new markets but might fire a CEO who spends $100 million pursuing something new that fails. So, lots of CEOs just stay with the bird in the hand.

Might be true, recently there have been highly boasted improvements in the RTL-to-GDSII pipeline, using AI, as one does. Both from Cadence and Synopsys.

Same here. It's a terrible place if you want to try to get things done. Meetings about meetings and nobody ever wants to make a decision.

> and the expertise to be desired by anyone

Seriously...Jim Keller doesn't apply to work places....places seek him out. The interview process is Jim interviewing the company, not the other way around.

One of my jobs, I was interviewing candidates on my last week. It was all fine, until the candidate asked "Why do you like to work on this team?" ... luckily we were at the end of time, so I could duck the question.