Raja Koduri Reunites with Jim Keller via Tenstorrent Board of Directors

Just two weeks after retiring from Intel, Raja Koduri joined the board of directors of Tenstorrent, an AI and high-performance RISC-V CPU company that intends to challenge the blue giant in the coming years, as noticed by @SquashBionic. A renowned developer of GPUs for graphics and compute, Raja Koduri will be joining his former colleagues from AMD, ATI, and Intel.

Tenstorrent is developing datacenter solutions comprising of RISC-V-based AI/ML accelerators as well as high-performance RISC-V general purpose processors. The company was established in 2016 by Ljubisa Bajic, and it is presently led by Jim Keller, a renowned CPU architect who has spearheaded the creation of revolutionary processor architectures at companies such as Apple, AMD, and DEC. (We recently outlined Tenstorrent's short and mid-term plans.)

Truth to be told, a position in the board of directors does not imply that Raja will be able to influence development of CPUs or AI accelerators. Yet, he will have his word when setting Tenstorrent's strategic goals and strategic roadmap, something that is particularly important. Being developer of AI accelerators and high-performance RISC-V CPUs, Tenstorrent is essentially travelling in uncharted watersm since AI-related technologies are changing rapidly, whereas the open-source RISC-V microarchitecture is poised to change fast in general. 

To a large degree, development of AI and RISC-V hardware these days resembles development of GPUs back in the 1990's and 2000's when companies tried a variety of approaches and usually changed microarchitectures radically once in a year or two. That's something that we barely see these days in the fields of x86 and Arm CPUs as well as GPUs from companies like Arm, AMD, Nvidia, and Intel.

Koduri has already worked both with Jim Keller and Ljubisa Bajic while at AMD (with both), Intel (Keller), and Apple (Keller). Most recently Koduri and Keller worked together at Intel developing high-performance compute GPUs and CPUs, respectively. While the two have very different backgrounds and fields of expertise, both have plenty of experience in building high-performance hardware, something that Tenstorrent can certainly take advantage of.