Jim Keller joins Tenstorrent at President and CTO – They have “most promising architecture out there”

Jim Keller joins Tentorrent at President and CTO - They have

Jim Keller joins Tenstorrent at President and CTO – They have “most promising architecture out there”

Jim Keller is a legend of the technology sector, having worked at AMD, Apple, and Tesla at pivotal points in their history. During his two stints at AMD, Keller worked on AMD’s K7, K8 and Zen architectures, the x86-64 instruction set and HyperTransport interconnect. At Apple, he helped develop their A4-A7 processors. At Tesla, he helped design their custom autonomous vehicle processors. For any tech company, adding Jim Keller to your team is a newsworthy event. 

In mid-2020, Jim Keller left Intel citing “personal reasons”. Now, six months later, Tenstorrent has announced that Keller is becoming their President and CTO. This announcement comes immediately after the end of Keller’s six month consultancy period with Intel following his departure. 

Tenstorrent is an AI company that offers AI software and hardware to offer its customers full-stack solutions to their AI performance needs. Tenstorrent creates hardware, uses that hardware to create systems, and develops software that can get the most out of their hardware. With optimisations at every step of their process, they can create powerful training and inferencing solutions for their customers. 

As part of Tenstorrent’s press release, Jim Keller states that the company has the “most promising architecture out there” and is “poised to become a next-gen computing giant.” That’s high praise from one of the industry’s most famed and respected architects. 
 
At 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.” A simple way to think of Software 2.0 is software that’s written by software, code that can be written and optimised using neural networks to deliver the results we want. Software 2.0 can accelerate computing in ways that handwritten (human-produced) code cannot easily emulate, making it a critical aspect of future computers and next-generation software. 

Jim Keller move to Tenstorrent is a big deal for the company, and we look forward to seeing what hardware they can produce over the next few years. 

Jim Keller has resigned from Intel  
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