[The Exiled]

Jim Keller Becomes CTO at Tenstorrent: "The Most Promising Architecture Out There"

Today Tenstorrent reached out to inform us that Jim Keller has taken the position of President and Chief Technology Officer of the company, as well as being a member of its Board of Directors. Jim's role, based on his previous expertise, would appear to be in the design of future products for the company as well as building on the team at Tenstorrent to succeed in that goal. Tenstorrent is a pure-play fab-less AI chip design and software company, which means that they create and design silicon for machine learning, then use a foundry to make the hardware, then work with partners to create solutions (as in, chips + system + software + optimizations for that customer).

For those that know this space, this makes the company sound like any of the other 50 companies out in the market that seem to be doing the same thing. The typical split with pure-play fabless AI chip design companies is whether they are focused on training or inference: Tenstorrent does both, and is already in the process of finalizing its third generation processor. 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.

Izvor: AnandTech