Wednesday, January 6th 2021

Jim Keller joins Tenstorrent as President and CTO

Tenstorrent, a hardware start-up developing next generation computers, announces the addition of industry veteran Jim Keller as President, CTO, and board member. "Tenstorrent was founded on the belief that the ongoing shift towards ML-centric software necessitates a corresponding transformation in computational capabilities," said Ljubisa Bajic, Tenstorrent's CEO. "There is nobody more capable of executing this vision than Jim Keller, a leader who is equally great at designing computers, cultures, and organizations. I am thrilled to be working with Jim and beyond excited about the possibilities our partnership unlocks."

As CTO, Keller will lead Tenstorrent's efforts to be the hardware solution needed to address Software 2.0, the exciting industry shift towards using machine learning methods to solve problems previously addressed by traditional software. "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," Keller said. "Tenstorrent has made impressive progress, and with the most promising architecture out there, we are poised to become a next gen computing giant."
Keller's addition to both the team and the board is a strong vote of confidence in Tenstorrent's ability to become a major player in a sector currently dominated by behemoths.

"Tenstorrent's differentiated approach to accelerating AI, along with the team's pedigree, are what convinced Eclipse to initially invest in 2017. We are committed to supporting their ambitious vision, and Jim's arrival only further bolsters our faith in that vision," said Greg Reichow, partner at Eclipse and Tenstorrent board member.

Keller joined Tenstorrent following two years as Senior Vice President of Intel's Silicon Engineering Group. He has held roles as Tesla's Vice President of Autopilot and Low Voltage Hardware, Corporate Vice President and Chief Cores Architect at AMD, and Vice President of Engineering and Chief Architect at P.A. Semi, which was acquired by Apple Inc.

During his long and impactful career he has helped create some of today's most iconic technology including the AMD Zen, K7 (Athlon) and K8 micro-architectures, Apple A4-A7 processors, the x86-64 instruction set and HyperTransport interconnect.
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28 Comments on Jim Keller joins Tenstorrent as President and CTO

#1
Vya Domus
Meh, looks like you're average machine learning accelerators startup. Nothing special.
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#2
bonehead123
ml ACCELERATORS = SKYNET in disguise....hehehehe :)
Posted on Reply
#3
mtcn77
It sounds like a distributed p2p server branding. I'm sure they have thought of any and all bad press coming out of it.
Posted on Reply
#4
1d10t
mtcn77It sounds like a distributed p2p server branding. I'm sure they have thought of any and all bad press coming out of it.
More like pr0n community sharing platform :D
Aside from that, pretty strange to found Jim Keller set sail on small boat.
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#5
windwhirl
At this point, I just think of Keller as that little kid in a candy store, excited about every single kind of candy out there. Except he's the one making the recipes lol
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#6
csgabe
Tentsforrent? Is this serious or a April 1st joke again?
Posted on Reply
#8
kapone32
bonehead123ml ACCELERATORS = SKYNET in disguise....hehehehe :)
There is a Game called Synthetik that proposes exactly that. "We tried to limit CPU performance to 1%" But the 5 supercomputers left joined and gained consciousness"
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#9
medi01
What a laughable position for a guy of his caliber. Essentially a big name to attract some investor money to an otherwise faceless, yet another, AI startup.
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#10
windwhirl
medi01What a laughable position for a guy of his caliber. Essentially a big name to attract some investor money to an otherwise faceless, yet another, AI startup.
Is it, though? I mean, this is not his first time doing this kind of stuff:

So I think he can "smell" an interesting opportunity when he sees it...

Furthermore, the staff of that startup seems to be pretty impressive too
AnandtechFounded in 2016, Tenstorrent has around 70 employees between Toronto and Austin. The critical members of the company all have backgrounds in silicon design: the CEO led power and performance architecture at AMD as well as system architecture for Tegra at NVIDIA, the head of system software spent 16 years across AMD and Altera, and there’s expertise from neural network accelerator design from Intel, GPU systems engineering at AMD, Arm CPU verification leads, IO virtualization expertise at AMD, Intel’s former neural network compiler team lead, as well as AMD’s former security and network development lead
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#11
Mysteoa
1d10tMore like pr0n community sharing platform :D
Aside from that, pretty strange to found Jim Keller set sail on small boat.
I don't think he cares about the size of the boat, but how interesting it is.
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#12
Chrispy_
Tenstorrent's logo is a straight ripoff of the Unity logo.

I thought it was a subdivision of Unity Technologies at first....
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#13
bug
Vya DomusMeh, looks like you're average machine learning accelerators startup. Nothing special.
It's got Jim Keller on board (in both senses), that's special enough.
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#14
DeathtoGnomes
Software 2.0 will make the Star Trek beam technology doable. :kookoo: :kookoo: :kookoo: :kookoo: :roll:
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#15
windwhirl
DeathtoGnomesSoftware 2.0 will make the Star Trek beam technology doable. :kookoo: :kookoo: :kookoo: :kookoo: :roll:
Sounds like the most simplistic name ever given to a piece of, well, software.

Sounds a bit like me, honestly. I'm not a fan of fancy names lol
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#16
LemmingOverlord
I think he's moved to the opposite of Intel. He went from a company where he was given a title, but no control, had to deal with legacy crap through-and-through, to a company where he's literally in charge, decides the direction, and probably doesn't need to care much about the outcome.
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#17
bug
LemmingOverlordI think he's moved to the opposite of Intel. He went from a company where he was given a title, but no control, had to deal with legacy crap through-and-through, to a company where he's literally in charge, decides the direction, and probably doesn't need to care much about the outcome.
I tend to do that, too: go for a challenge and bail when I feel I can't move things. I'm a little less known than Jim, that's all :D
Posted on Reply
#18
Wirko
DeathtoGnomesSoftware 2.0 will make the Star Trek beam technology doable. :kookoo: :kookoo: :kookoo: :kookoo: :roll:
No doubt but that will be Star Trek beam-as-a-service.
Posted on Reply
#19
bug
WirkoNo doubt but that will be Star Trek beam-as-a-service.
I'm still stupefied nobody markets Service-as-a-Service yet.
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#20
Caring1
It's a pay check Jim, but not as we know it.
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#21
Fouquin
This is what these high level engineers do. There's like 400 others at Jim's level who just bounce between projects for the novelty of it. They don't have to always work for the big guys developing their future roadmaps for them to help fix brain drain by poor management.
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#22
bug
FouquinThis is what these high level engineers do. There's like 400 others at Jim's level who just bounce between projects for the novelty of it. They don't have to always work for the big guys developing their future roadmaps for them to help fix brain drain by poor management.
More like, they know better how to tell apart a real interesting prospect from marketing speak.
And that's ok, when they succeed, we get better stuff to buy :clap:
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#23
Aquinus
Resident Wat-man
Jesus, have none of you worked for a startup before? If Jim Keller has a vision and there is funding behind it, who cares? We know he has great ideas that have materialized into good designs. This really could be a good thing. We just don't know yet, but what we do know is that Jim is a smart guy. This should be potentially exciting news.
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#25
Octopuss
How can a startup afford someone like this?
Posted on Reply
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