[ad_1]
//php echo do_shortcode(‘[responsivevoice_button voice=”US English Male” buttontext=”Listen to Post”]’) ?>
Tenstorrent co-founder and current CTO Ljubisa Bajicf has stepped down, the company said. Bajic, who traded roles with new CEO Jim Keller four months ago, will remain with the AI chip and IP company in an advisory capacity. He will also remain on the board, but will step back from his day-to-day duties.
Bajic co-founded Tenstorrent in 2016 with Ivan Hamer and Milos Trajkovic, with Keller coming on board in 2021. Under Bajic’s leadership, the startup grew to nearly 300 employees and taped out two generations of product, though neither product is yet on the market.
Tenstorrent declined to make public the reason for Bajic’s departure, but said that Bajic will pursue new projects.
“Seeing Tenstorrent grow from an idea in a basement to a full-fledged operation has been an incredible accomplishment,” Bajic said in prepared remarks. “I’m looking forward to seeing our capable team take the company into its next era.”
“Ljubisa is a brilliant technologist and I am deeply grateful to him for driving Tenstorrent to what it is today,” Keller said in prepared remarks. “We are both incredibly proud of the work we have done together and I can’t wait to see what this next chapter holds for him.”
Koduri joins board
Tenstorrent also announced that industry veteran Raja Koduri will join the company’s board of directors.
Until recently, Koduri was executive vice president and chief architect at Intel, where he led Intel’s Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics business for five years, with responsibility for the Intel Xe GPU architecture, its data center GPU lines and its Arc consumer graphics GPUs. He joined Intel in 2017 from AMD where he was chief architect of the Radeon technology group, overseeing AMD’s GPU business. Prior to that, he was director of graphics architecture at Apple.
Koduri left Intel two weeks ago to form a generative AI software startup focused on media and entertainment.
Koduri, a 27-year veteran of GPU architecture, told EE Times there is certainly a place for non-GPU AI hardware in the data center, despite relatively low uptake in the market so far.
“I have believed for a long time that that right architecture for AI is a targeted mix of scalar (CPU), vector (GPU) and matrix (AI) compute engines, the primary reason being software,” he said. “With the focus on high performance RISC-V cores, Tenstorrent is on the right architecture path, along with collaborations from the ecosystem.”
With so many well-funded AI chip startups targeting the data center, why join Tenstorrent?
“The primary reason is Jim Keller,” Koduri said. “He is the best engineer I have ever worked with. He has sown very interesting seeds at Tenstorrent and the surrounding RISC-V ecosystem. I believe these investments will bloom into a wonderful ecosystem and I wanted to do my part to help.”
Koduri also said that concern around generative AI being in the hands of the few who can afford to train it was justified, and that with his new generative AI startup he plans to “collaborate with Tenstorrent and the rest of the RISC-V ecosystem to address these problems.”
Koduri, who is Indian American, and Keller are currently in Bengaluru, India, where Tenstorrent has been hosting a RISC-V event for engineers and students.
Describing Koduri as a combination of a board member, CTO and AI strategist, Keller joked about getting a “pretty good deal” during his keynote at the event.
“Raja and I, we’ve worked together for 15 years, and we’re like brothers with different parents—sometimes it goes really well, sometimes we have fistfights,” he joked. “But we appreciate [Koduri] joining and helping to drive this.”
During his keynote, Keller also admitted Tenstorrent was “struggling” on the software side.
“AI processor software is really hard. We’re struggling, by the way. We’re a year late,” he said, adding that Tenstorrent plans to tape out its next-gen RISC-V design in about two months.
“Everybody said, where are you getting the software?” he said. “RISC-V runs Linux and all the open-source stuff, but you have to port it, you have to qualify it, you have to validate it, and we started to see the ball really start to move last year, which is pretty exciting.”
India’s RISC-V ecosystem
Tenstorrent is headquartered in Canada with offices in the U.S. and India, where Tenstorrent supports the Indian government’s Digital India RISC-V program. The company has partnered with, and invested in, Bodhi Computing, an Indian startup founded by two ex-Intel executives. As part of the deal, Keller will join Bodhi’s board, Tenstorrent will invest in Bodhi, and the two companies will work together on technology, with a view to Bodhi licensing Tenstorrent RISC-V AI designs for its server products targeting India’s data center, enterprise, HPC, telecoms and automotive markets.
“We’re building some really great teams in India,” Keller said at the event. “I think Bodhi is going to be the start of something really great, and Raja and I are working on a couple more adventures… RISC-V is part of the plan and it’s a key part because that’s where we can change stuff, which is a really big deal, and it is going to enable a whole bunch of really interesting designs. A hundred companies innovating is going to be way faster than five.”
Keller noted that he and Koduri are involved with four more stealth startups, some in India.
“The concept Raja and I have been talking to investors about is each company is solid, standalone, has customers, it’s independently viable – but together with a little bit of collaboration, it’s bigger than the sum of the parts it’s starting to have,” he said.
[ad_2]
Source link
