Jim Keller joins ex-Intel chip designers in RISC-V startup focused on breakthrough CPUs

Tenstorrent
(Image credit: Tenstorrent)

Jim Keller, a legendary CPU designer and the chief executive of Tenstorrent, this week announced that he had joined the board of directors of AheadComputing, a startup formed by ex-Intel engineers that develops 'breakthrough' application processors based on the RISC-V instruction set architecture. AheadComputing was established by Intel veterans working at the Advanced Architecture Development Group, the crème-de-la-crème of Intel engineers.

"Happy to announce I am on the board of AheadComputing," Jim Keller wrote in an X post. "Debbie Marr is the CEO, she is great. We are making the RISC-V ecosystem, rich, broad, and solid. CPUs, AI, support IP, and software. Open RISC-V is where you can innovate. Unconstrained."

AheadComputing's founding team used to work at Intel's Advanced Architecture Development Group (AADG). It shaped multiple Intel CPU generations spanning desktops, laptops, and servers while specializing in CPU microarchitecture, performance, memory controllers, and even AI/ML workloads.

Given the expertise of its co-founders and Jim Keller's comments, AheadComputing seems likely to specialize in AI and HPC and support IP, which resembles the focus of Jim Keller's Tenstorrent. The company indicates that one of its goals is to develop CPU cores that excel in per-core performance, which is a focus of virtually all CPU developers today, including Apple, AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm.

AheadComputing was founded last year by four Intel veterans: Debbie Marr (now CEO), Jonathan Pearce, Srikanth Srinivasan, and Mark Dechene. Together, they worked at Intel for about a century.

Debbie Marr had an extraordinary career at Intel. She joined 1988 as a design engineer for Intel's Super VGA graphics accelerator and then switched to the Intel 386SL processor, the company's first laptop CPU, in 1989. She was also one of the architects of Intel Pentium Pro (the company's first server processor), numerous Pentium 4 generations (Willamette, Foster, Prescott), and Intel's breakthrough Nehalem architecture.

Marr also developed Intel's Hyper-Threading technology while working on various Pentium 4 iterations. She then became the chief CPU architect for Intel Haswell and Intel Icelake, from pathfinding to execution. In 2019, she became the chief architect of AADG and led it until mid-2024, when she left to found AheadComputing. Jim Keller worked at Intel during Marr's tenure at AADG.

Other founding team members also worked on various of Intel's high-performance and energy-efficient CPU microarchitectures, including Nehalem, Haswell, Broadwell, and Tremont. Meanwhile, Jonathan Pearce led a proof-of-concept research project of an innovative 'microprocessor architecture with breakthrough performance for AI/ML/HPC algorithms.' Overall, AheadComputing has a very experienced team that used to work on some of the best CPUs ever designed and contributed to developing AI and GPU architectures.

Earlier this month, AheadComputing announced that it had secured $21.5 million in initial funding to develop a new microprocessor architecture designed to handle workloads for AI, cloud computing, and edge devices. Investors include Eclipse Ventures, Maverick Capital, Fundomo, EPIQ Capital Group, and Jim Keller. With this funding, AheadComputing plans to expand its engineering team and accelerate the development of its core technology. At present, the company has around 40 employees.

"As esteemed former senior Intel CPU architects, AheadComputing's leadership team is uniquely equipped to solve the complex challenges facing today's computing industry," said Greg Reichow, Partner at Eclipse. "Their commitment to delivering the highest performance cores — while ensuring energy efficiency — will significantly impact multiple industries like mobile, industrial and networking."

Anton Shilov
Contributing Writer

Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.

  • SonoraTechnical
    How does RISC-V compare to CISC/X86-X64 and ARM flavors in terms of :

    code size
    licensing
    performance
    power consumption
    suitability as the foundation for mobile / portable devices (silicon size I guess is what's important here)...

    I just don't know much about it, or had any experience with it other than the old days of extracting data sets off of Sun Microsystems running RISC cpus and Unix.
    Reply
  • TerryLaze
    License is free and all the other things depend on the design of the CPU which is why everybody tries their own thing, they all make the design that best fits what they want to do.
    It's not like intel and amd where you have specific CPUs to talk about, anybody can do anything they want and produce them anywhere they want.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    The article said:
    The company indicates that one of its goals is to develop CPU cores that excel in per-core performance, which is a focus of virtually all CPU developers today, including Apple, AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm.
    Not Ampere Computing. They're focusing on density-optimized CPUs for cloud applications. They're not exactly "little" cores, but more like "medium" cores.
    https://chipsandcheese.com/p/ampereone-at-hot-chips-2024-maximizing-density
    Reply
  • ekio
    I can’t wait to see some good performance RISC-V cpus.

    This is the best ISA in terms of technical design and for licensing.

    I want my PC to run with it.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    SonoraTechnical said:
    How does RISC-V compare to CISC/X86-X64 and ARM flavors in terms of :
    Those categories are too broad. In all of them, you can find examples of big and small cores that support either a large or small subset of the total ISA.

    SonoraTechnical said:
    code size
    While not strictly code size, here are 3-way instruction count comparisons of two different workloads.

    Please keep in mind that neither of the RISC-V cores they investigated support the vector extensions. They're just 1 generation too early for that, and it explains why the instruction counts are so vastly higher for x264, in particular. I'm showing these mainly for what it tells us about how baseline x86-64 compares with ARMv8-A (both of which have been superseded, BTW).


    Source: https://chipsandcheese.com/p/a-risc-v-progress-check-benchmarkingLower is better. It's pretty intriguing what an advantage ARM has here, considering that ARM CPUs also tend to have wider front ends.

    SonoraTechnical said:
    licensing
    x86 cores can only be made by Intel, AMD, and VIA/Zhaoxin.

    ARM can be designed by anyone who obtains an architectural license from ARM, or you can license pre-designed cores from ARM and integrate them into your own SoC.

    RISC-V can be designed by anyone, without the need for an architectural license. You can also license pre-designed cores from SiFive and many others.

    SonoraTechnical said:
    performance
    RISC-V doesn't have examples of high-performance cores yet, in the wild. There are some server CPUs, such as those designed by Ventana, which should be launching soonish, IIRC.
    https://www.ventanamicro.com
    So far, most RISC-V activity has been in the area of embedded computing.

    SonoraTechnical said:
    power consumption
    All three are all over the map. You have to narrow down to specific implementations.

    SonoraTechnical said:
    suitability as the foundation for mobile / portable devices (silicon size I guess is what's important here)...
    ARM currently dominates mobile. ARM and RISC-V mostly dominate IoT/embedded. Look for RISC-V to make major inroads into mobile, soon.
    Reply
  • Findecanor
    Together, they worked at Intel for about a century.
    min(25, 25, 25, 25) ≠ sum(25, 25, 25, 25)
    Reply
  • TerryLaze
    bit_user said:
    x86 cores can only be made by Intel, AMD, and VIA/Zhaoxin.
    Anybody can make x86 cores, the companies you list have additional IP that is needed to make a competing x86 core.
    That's why we had like a dozen companies making pre pentium CPUs , why it was called "ibm and compatibles" the trick is making a core that is actually useful today, or even compared to an pentium which is why that was the cut off point for all but the two that remain.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86
    Open
    Partly. For some advanced features, x86 may require license from Intel, though some do not need it;citation needed] x86-64 may require an additional license from AMD. The Pentium Pro processor (and NetBurst) has been on the market for more than 21 years and so cannot be subject to patent claims. The i686 subset of the x86 architecture is therefore fully open. The Opteron 1000 series processors have been on the market for more than 21 years and so cannot be subject to patent claims. The AMD K8 subset of the x86 architecture is therefore fully open.
    Reply
  • Thunder64
    bit_user said:
    ARM currently dominates mobile. ARM and RISC-V mostly dominate IoT/embedded. Look for RISC-V to make major inroads into mobile, soon.

    Is the IoT still a thing? I thought it was supposed to be the next "big thing"? You know, like 3DTV, VR, and currently AI (which seems to be a thing).

    TerryLaze said:
    Anybody can make x86 cores, the companies you list have additional IP that is needed to make a competing x86 core.
    That's why we had like a dozen companies making pre pentium CPUs , why it was called "ibm and compatibles" the trick is making a core that is actually useful today, or even compared to an pentium which is why that was the cut off point for all but the two that remain.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86

    Good luck with that.
    Reply
  • DS426
    Good on Jim Keller! Nice to have a major player in the industry on board to move things forward with RISC-V.

    As for Ms. Marr, another mixed bag as Pentium 4 started out terrible (and didn't end great, either), Haswell was meh, and Ice Lake was interesting in that they were fabbed on Intel 10nm (+, even though they removed that later, lol) while their desktop counterparts were still on 14nm +++++++++++.

    Successes worth mentioning would be Pentium III (aside from the errate fiasco) and Nehalem's introduction (as mentioned in the article). HyperThreading is great and all too... just don't mention P4. :P

    Speaking of Intel: they're STILL looking for a permanent CEO? None too optimistic to jump aboard the 18A train?
    Reply
  • CelicaGT
    Ah, finally some interesting and GOOD tech news.
    Reply