Jim Keller started as Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at the Canadian AI start-up Tenstorrent, where he wants to design “new and interesting stuff”. Tenstorrent develops processors for training and executing neural networks – keyword machine learning.

Keller was most recently at Intel as Senior Vice President of Silicon for two years Engineering Group. Translated: Chip chief developer. In the middle 2020 the engineer resigned from his post and stayed with Intel as a consultant for six months. This deadline expired at the end of December. According to speculation, Intel’s company structures should have been too stuck for Keller.

Of 2018 until 2020 Jim Keller worked at Intel; last year his employment there ended.

(Image: Intel)

Cellars previously responsible from 2016 to 2018 the development of Tesla’s autopilot AI hardware, before that he headed AMD’s Zen team for Ryzen and Epyc CPUs for four years. From … to 2012 Keller and his team developed Apple’s first own smartphone systems on chip (SoCs) A4 and A5. In all cases (apart from Intel), Keller left structures that were successful in the following years.

620 – mm² chip “Grayskull” Tenstorrent is one of dozen start-ups that develop AI processors, but unlike many other companies, it has finished hardware that is currently being delivered to major customers for evaluation purposes. The start-up currently has about 70 employees, including high-ranking ex-engineers from AMD, ARM, Intel and Nvidia. CEO Ljubisa Bajic held senior positions at both AMD and Nvidia.

The “Grayskull” AI chip contains 100 self-designed computing cores, four programmable RISC-V cores, 120 MByte SRAM cache, eight LPDDR4 memory channels (Octa-Channel) and is used as a plug-in card via 16 PCI-Express 4.0 lanes connected.

With 368 INT8-TOPS or 92 FP 16 – TFlops at 65 Watt Thermal Design Power (TDP), the chip is not one of the fastest of its kind, thanks to 12 – Nanometer production at Globalfoundries can be quite cheap. Round 620 mm² measures “Grayskull”. The successor generation “Wormhole” planned for 2021 integrates a network switch including 16 Ethernet ports (each 100 GBit / s) and relies on GDDR6-RAM.

(mma)