Industry veteran Jim Keller, known for his extensive career in developing processor architectures for numerous companies, has now joined startup Tenstorrent. Until recently, the company had been examining the potential of chip production at Samsung. Now, as it turns out, Keller is also assisting Japanese company Rapidus in the creation of an advanced computing accelerator.
The collaboration between Tenstorrent and Rapidus was announced earlier this week, according to a report by Bloomberg. It is important to note that Rapidus, a Japanese company founded eighteen months ago by a consortium of investors, aims to establish the contract-based production of 2-nm chips in Japan by 2027. Rapidus’ technological partners include IBM, research center Imec in Belgium, and the French institute Leti.
With the involvement of Rapidus’ management, the LSTC research center was set up in Japan. Tenstorrent is assisting the center in chip development for artificial intelligence (AI) accelerators, licensing a portion of its designs and providing overall support in the process. The AI accelerators, following Tenstorrent’s operational profile, would utilize the open-source RISC-V architecture. Additionally, the startup will maintain communication with U.S. regulators to prevent any leakage of technology that could be sensitive to the U.S.
Rapidus representatives have expressed hopes that, with Tenstorrent’s support, they would be able to start production of energy-efficient chips for computation accelerators. This is due to a notable increase in energy consumption by data centers as AI systems develop rapidly. Alongside Jim Keller, the Tenstorrent team consists of about 400 specialists, including other industry veterans who have previously worked at AMD and Apple.
