In 2021, semiconductor industry god Jim Keller, known as the “Silicon Immortal,” officially joined Tenstorrent, a little-known AI chip startup, as chief technology officer and president. Technology Officer and President, becoming CEO in January 2023 and joining the company’s board of directors.

In 2023, Keller and Sam Zeloof (who built his own 1,200-transistor CPU in his garage and was known as the “Silicon Prodigy”) founded Atomic Semi, a startup seeking to build a small, fast semiconductor fab. Samsung and the “Silicon Prodigy.

▲ Image source; Tenstorrent

Samsung Electronics will work with Tenstorrent and Groq to develop AI semiconductor chips for use in advanced IT equipment, sources said.

If this task leads to mass production, it is expected that its chips will be manufactured on Samsung’s sub-5-nn EUV line and packaged in a 2.5D packaging facility.

Industry experts speculate that if Samsung successfully completes the project with the two companies it will have a significant impact on the foundry market.

As the size of the AI market driven by ChatGPT continues to grow, Samsung’s foundry, an early adopter of the partnership, could reap significant profits if the two startups’ positions are strengthened.

In addition, both companies have a lot of potential in the global AI industry, and Jim Keller, needless to say, is a legend in the semiconductor space, having led the design of state-of-the-art semiconductors at Apple, Tesla, Intel and AMD.

IT Home has learnt that Groq is a semiconductor company founded in 2016 by former Google employee Jonathan Ross, and the company’s recent partnership with Meta has fuelled speculation that Groq could pose a threat to Nvidia.

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Who is Jim Keller? Many people have heard of him, and many people do not know, that he has more than 20 years of experience in the semiconductor industry, 1998 in DEC involved in the Alpha processor development, after 1998 to join AMD, involved in the K7, J8 architecture CPU development, and after leaving the CPU development of Broadcom, PA Semi and Apple, and in 2012 to return to AMD, involved in the Zen processor development.

In 2016, he left AMD six months before the Zen processor was launched and went to Tesla to develop self-driving chips. In 2018, he went to Intel but left in 2020, and now works as an executive in a startup called Tenstorrent, mainly designing AI chips with RISC-V architecture, claiming to surpass AMD/NVIDIA.

He has participated in the chip industry in the development of Alpha, x86, ARM and other architectures, and now mainly RISC-V architecture. It is only after understanding these backgrounds that he can understand his stance on RISC-V, which he believes is bound to win in the future.

The reason is also very simple, RISC-V chips are now feasible and open standards, innovation in this field is happening, compared to other architectures rise more quickly.

Even considering that he himself is engaged in RSIC-V R&D, Jim Keller’s summary of the four major advantages of RISC-V is very objective, which is also the current reality. Compared with x86 and ARM architectures, RISC-V obviously has shortcomings in performance, ecology and other issues, but it is also far more open and faster than the other two architectures.

In July, RISC-V International Foundation CEO Calista Redmond said that open standards are key.

She said: “Linux has done it in the software space, and we are doing it in the hardware space.” She said: We estimate that there are already 10 billion cores on the market.”

What kind of concept is that? Even the ARM architecture took 17 years to do 10 billion cores shipped until 2008.

She thinks RISC-V can reach what ARM has accomplished in 20 years in the next five years.

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