It is excessive reward when somebody like Jim Keller says that your organization ‘has made impressive progress, and has the most promising architecture out there’. That reward means twice as a lot if Keller truly joins the corporate. Today Tenstorrent is saying that Jim Keller, compute architect extraordinaire, has joined the corporate as its Chief Technology Officer, President, and joins the corporate board.
To our common viewers, Jim Keller is a recognized knowledgeable in all issues pc structure. His historical past begins at DEC, designing Alpha processors, earlier than transferring to a primary stint at AMD for 2 years working to launch K7 and K8. Keller spent 4 years as Chief Architect at SiByte/Broadcom designing MIPS for community interfaces, 4 years at P.A. Semi, 4 years at Apple (A4+A5), then again to AMD for 3 years two years as Corporate VP and Chief Cores Architect answerable for the brand new technology of CPU architectures, Ok12 and Zen. This was then adopted with two years at Tesla as VP of Autopilot Hardware Engineering creating the Full Self-Driving chip, then two years as Intel’s Senior VP of the Silicon Engineering Group, earlier than leaving in June 2020. Since his departure from Intel, quite a few key trade analysts (and ourselves) have been guessing the place Jim would land. He briefly appeared within the viewers of Elon Musk’s Neuralink presentation in August 2020, alongside Lex Fridman.
| Jim Keller: Work Experience | ||||
| AnandTech | Company | Title | Important Product |
|
| 1980s | 1998 | DEC | Architect | Alpha |
| 1998 | 1999 | AMD | Lead Architect | K7, K8 |
| 1999 | 2000 | SiByte | Chief Architect | MIPS Networking |
| 2000 | 2004 | Broadcom | Chief Architect | MIPS Networking |
| 2004 | 2008 | P.A. Semi | VP Engineering | Low Power Mobile |
| 2008 | 2012 | Apple | VP Engineering | A4 / A5 Mobile |
| 8/2012 | 9/2015 | AMD | Corp VP and Chief Cores Architect |
Skybridge / Ok12 (+ Zen) |
| 1/2016 | 4/2018 | Tesla | VP Autopilot Hardware Engineering |
Fully Self-Driving (FSD) Chip |
| 4/2018 | 6/2020 | Intel | Senior VP Silicon Engineering |
? |
| 2021 | Tenstorrent | President and CTO | TBD | |
Today Tenstorrent reached out to tell us that Jim Keller has taken the place of President and Chief Technology Officer of the corporate, in addition to being a member of its Board of Directors. Jim’s function, primarily based on his earlier experience, would look like within the design of future merchandise for the corporate in addition to constructing on the group at Tenstorrent to reach that purpose.
CEO Ljubisa Bajic confirmed Jim’s appointment as President and CTO of the corporate, stating that:
Tenstorrent was based on the assumption that the continuing shift in the direction of ML-centric software program necessitates a corresponding transformation in computational capabilities. There is no person extra able to executing this imaginative and prescient than Jim Keller, a pacesetter who’s equally nice at designing computer systems, cultures, and organizations. I’m thrilled to be working with Jim and past excited in regards to the prospects our partnership unlocks.
Tenstorrent is a pure-play fab-less AI chip design and software program firm, which implies that they create and design silicon for machine studying, then use a foundry to make the {hardware}, then work with companions to create options (as in, chips + system + software program + optimizations for that buyer). For people who know this house, this makes the corporate sound like several of the opposite 50 firms out available in the market that appear to be doing the identical factor. The typical break up with pure-play fabless AI chip design firms is whether or not they’re targeted on coaching or inference: Tenstorrent does each, and is already within the strategy of finalizing its third…
