In a post spotted by Tom’s Hardware, Jim Keller, a living tech legend, announced his arrival on the board of directors of a startup called AheadComputing. His goal: to get RISC-V off the ground, an architecture full of promise, but largely neglected by the hardware bigwigs. A move that could well cause a stir in all corners of the industry.
In the world of hardware, few figures are as influential and revered as Jim Keller. The man has a CV as long as a roll of toilet paper, and filled with successes that are as remarkable as each other.
To begin with, he was the great architect of the Athlon 64 and Opteron processors — AMD's very first 64-bit x86 processors. For the company, these chips were the gateway to an era where this architecture has become ultra-dominant, with more than 95% of the market share today. He was also the big boss of the team that gave birth to AMD's formidable Zen processors (Ryzen, EPYC). These chips were at the origin of a real resurrection for the orange team, whose processors are now the benchmark while its historic competitor, Intel, is no longer able to keep its head above water.
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More recently, he also worked on Apple's A4 and A5 chips, which contributed to the phenomenal success of iPhones and iPads, as well as on FSD (Full Self Driving), the automatic piloting system that greatly contributed to Tesla's reputation and the current craze for autonomous vehicles.
AheadComputing, a concentration of rare talents
Suffice to say that the guy is one of the figures who have contributed to shaping a good part of our current technological ecosystem. There is almost no doubt that all the big names in the industry would pay astronomical sums to secure his services. But the person concerned does not see it that way. Apparently tired of the constraints inherent in Big Tech, he chose to focus on his true passion, innovation.
In 2021, he joined Tenstorrent, a startup specializing in hardware applied to artificial intelligence, and has just added another string to his bow by joining the management of AheadComputing.
This company is certainly not known to the general public - not surprising, since it has just celebrated its first anniversary. But it is nevertheless built on foundations that could not be more solid. It can notably count on a hard core composed of defectors from the prestigious Advanced Architecture Development Group, the prestigious design laboratory that made Intel's heyday for decades. According to Tom’s Hardware, the four founders are all seasoned veterans who have contributed greatly to some of the best hardware products the industry has produced in the last 30 years.
A leading standard-bearer for a neglected architecture
And with this new star recruit, this crack team seems more determined than ever to orchestrate a new paradigm shift thanks to an acronym familiar to hardware fans: RISC-V.
Like x86 and ARM, which recently came back to the forefront thanks to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X chips, it It’s a processor architecture—a set of instructions and data-processing methods that determine how components interact with hardware. But to date, it has never enjoyed the success of its competitors. Due to a combination of tacit industry conventions and various technological factors (compatibility, cost, etc.), RISC-V has more or less fallen into oblivion, and today has a virtually negligible market share.
And that’s a shame, because this architecture has some very serious arguments. For starters, it’s both entirely open source and highly modular, which allows hardware wizards to innovate with very few constraints. In addition, it’s notoriously simple and extremely efficient, with all that this implies for energy management. Particularly interesting qualities in this period, in a context where the rapid rise of AI is exerting very significant pressure on today’s architectures and hardware.
That was all it took to give these big shots ideas. With their new company, they will now try to develop extremely efficient and high-performance processor cores that could benefit from a decisive competitive advantage in the current ecosystem. A strategy that seems particularly relevant, and the arrival of this visionary Jim Keller only reinforces this interpretation.
Towards a big duel with ARM?
Once the startup gets to the heart of the matter, it could launch a real paradigm shift likely to shake up an entire industry. Indeed, the shockwave generated by the arrival of the Snapdragon X, based on the ARM architecture, clearly shows that the world is more open than ever to the idea of turning the x86 page.
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The challenge is to offer a mature, high-performance product that is, above all, compatible with the current ecosystem to ensure a painless transition — a sine qua non condition for hoping for any commercial success.
At present, ARM seems to be the architecture best positioned to achieve this. But who knows; maybe Keller will grace us with a new resounding coup with its new partners, and the future actually belongs to RISC-V. It will therefore be very interesting to follow the progress of AheadComputing, and we will meet you in a few years for an initial overview.
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