Jim Keller joins Tenstorrent - claims it's the most promising architecture

CPU architecture rockstar Jim Keller has found a new home. Over the past couple of decades, Keller worked on major products at various tech firms, including the AMD K7, K8 and Zen architectures, the Apple A4 and A5, and the Tesla Full Self-Driving chip. His last position was Senior VP of the Silicon Engineering Group at Intel, a job he left in June 2020 after spending two years at the chip giant.

Many wondered where Keller would end up next and now we have the answer. AnandTech discovered that Keller has joined Tenstorrent as its Chief Technology Officer and President.

Tenstorrent was founded in 2016 and is focused on the development of machine learning chips for scalable deep-learning systems. It's a small startup with about 70 employees, including well-known names from Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, and ARM.

According to Keller, Tenstorrent is working on the "most promising architecture out there":

So where exactly does Keller fit in if the current generation is already selling, and the next generation is almost ready to go? In speaking to the CEO, I confirmed that Keller ‘will be building new and interesting stuff with us’. This seems to suggest that the vision with Keller’s involvement is going to be on 2022/2023 hardware in mind, following Tenstorrent’s overriding Software 2.0 strategy that the hardware, compiler, and run-time offer a full-stack approach to sparse (and dense) AI matrix calculations. In Jim’s own words:

Software 2.0 is the largest opportunity for computing innovation in a long time. Victory requires a comprehensive re-thinking of compute and low level software. Tenstorrent has made impressive progress, and with the most promising architecture out there, we are poised to become a next gen computing giant.