Just two weeks after leaving Intel, Raja Koduri joined Tenstorrent’s board of directors. Tenstorrent is his AI and high-performance RISC-V CPU company that is meant to challenge the blue giant in the coming years. @squash bionicRenowned developer of GPUs for graphics and computing, Raja Koduri joins former colleagues at AMD, ATI and Intel.
Tenstorrent develops data center solutions consisting of RISC-V based AI/ML accelerators and high performance RISC-V general purpose processors. The company was founded in 2016 by Ljubisa Bajic and is currently headed by renowned CPU architect Jim Keller. He has spearheaded the creation of innovative processors his architecture at companies such as his Apple, AMD and DEC. (We recently outlined Tenstorrent’s short- and medium-term plans.)
Honestly, a board position doesn’t mean Raja can influence the development of CPUs or AI accelerators. Still, he promises something especially important in setting his Tenstorrent’s strategic goals and strategic roadmap. A developer of AI accelerators and high-performance RISC-V CPUs, his Tentorrent believes that AI-related technologies are changing rapidly, while his open-source RISC-V microarchitecture is generally rapidly changing. We are basically navigating uncharted territory because we are poised to change.
Recent AI and RISC-V hardware developments have largely followed the development of GPUs in the 1990s and 2000s, when companies tried different approaches and radically changed their microarchitecture usually once every year or two. similar. This is something we rarely see these days, not only in GPUs from companies like Arm, AMD, Nvidia, and Intel, but also in the realm of x86 and Arm CPUs.
Koduri has already worked with both Jim Keller and Ljubisa Bajic during his time at AMD (both), Intel (Keller), and Apple (Keller). Most recently, Koduri and Keller worked together at Intel to develop high-performance computing GPUs and CPUs, respectively. Although the two have vastly different backgrounds and areas of expertise, they both have extensive experience building high-performance hardware, something that Tenstorrent can definitely leverage.
