Jan 5 (Reuters) – Jim Keller, a prominent computing chip architect who left Intel Corp last year, has joined a Toronto – based startup group developing artificial intelligence chips.
Keller was named president, chief technology officer and board member of Tenstorrent Inc, a company founded in 2016 by Advanced Micro Devices Inc and former Nvidia Corp. expert Ljubisa Bajic to create an AI chip that resembles some the ways in which the human brain works to be more energy efficient than competitive brains.
Keller, who is also an AMD veteran, has been heavily involved in chip advancements at several companies. He worked on some of Apple Inc ‘s early proprietary processors that set their iPhone and iPad devices apart from Android competitors. In 2012, he attended AMD’s second stint helping design new high-end processors that have since helped the company gain market share against Intel in the data center market.
Keller moved to Tesla Inc in 2016 to help design a chip at the heart of its autonomous drive computing system before being hired by Intel in April 2018. He left Intel in June.
At Tenstorrent, Keller joins a team that will compete against major competitors such as Nvidia, a series of other startups and in-house efforts at companies such as Amazon.com Inc in the artificial intelligence market.
The Tenstorrent chips – named “Grayskull” and “Wormhole” – symbolize the human brain as they are designed to ignore unnecessary information and respond differently to, for example, a picture of a car versus a picture of a dog, all in the name of being more energy efficient. The snippets also work with the assumption that in the future software will involve programmers providing high-level instructions while smartly intelligent computers will writing much of the nitty gritty code needed to implement these human ideas.
“Victory needs a complete rethink of low-end computer software,” Keller of the artificial intelligence market said in a statement. (Reporting by Stephen Nellis; Editing by Aurora Ellis)