Jim Keller
CEO, Tenstorrent | Legendary Microprocessor Architect (AMD Zen, Apple A4/A5, Tesla HW)
CEO of Tenstorrent and widely regarded as the most influential microprocessor architect of modern computing. Led the design of AMD's Zen architecture (Ryzen/EPYC) and K7/K8, Apple's A4 and A5 mobile silicon (powering the iPhone 4/iPad), Tesla's Full Self-Driving (FSD) Autopilot hardware computer, and Intel's core silicon engineering. At Tenstorrent, he is pioneering open RISC-V and Tensix heterogeneous processor architectures to democratize AI compute.
Areas of focus
Professional niches
Proof of Work
Tesla Full Self-Driving (FSD) Dual-Chip Computer Architecture
Engineered Tesla's custom in-car FSD silicon featuring dual independent neural network accelerators processing 2,300 frames per second at under 72 watts, providing redundant lockstep execution for safety-critical real-time automotive vision.
Thermal dissipation in vehicle environments imposes strict wattage ceilings on sustained inference throughput.
Context: Custom dual NPU silicon operating on 8 camera streams at 36-teraops per chip.
View missionTenstorrent Wormhole & Blackhole RISC-V AI Accelerator Architecture
Architected the Wormhole and Blackhole processor cards integrating Tensix array cores with native RISC-V scalar processors and on-chip Ethernet switches, enabling direct chip-to-chip 2D mesh networking for LLM tensor parallel training without external PCIe bridges.
Software compiler ecosystem (TT-Metalium) requires continuous software developer adoption to compete with NVIDIA CUDA.
Context: Scalable RISC-V and Tensix matrix cores running Llama 3 and DeepSeek MoE workloads over native Ethernet topology.
View mission