Jim Keller's Tenstorrent secures $200 million in new funding, looks to surpass Nvidia's AI

[onetheycallEric]

What just happened? Tenstorrent announced today that it has wrapped up a round of Series C funding, bringing in over $200 million that sees the company’s value estimated at $1 billion. The silicon design firm is looking to challenge Nvidia in the AI market, and the additional funds will presumably allow them to build a sustainable roadmap to do so.

Tenstorrent is currently working on the Grayskull AI processor, which has already been sampling with select early customers. The Grayskull architecture uses proprietary Tensix cores, with each core using a programmable single instruction multiple data (SIMD) processor, a high utilization packet processor, and five single-issue RISC cores. Grayskull is slated to hit the market in the back half of 2021.

“Our goal is to continue creating AI focused hardware for developers. Having a great investor like Fidelity is going to help us build a sustainable company for the long term,” said Ljubisa Bajic, Tenstorrent’s CEO, of the recent funding.

We've raised money to continue creating AI focused hardware for developers. A big Thank You to all of our investors. Our Grayskull processor will be available in the second half of 2021. https://t.co/BfOgdj1vtv

— Tenstorrent Inc. (@tenstorrent) May 20, 2021

The funding round was led by Fidelity Management, and also included capital injections from Eclipse Ventures, Epic CG, and Moore Capital. Tenstorrent is currently backed by Eclipse Ventures and Real Ventures.

Tenstorrent is led by processor architects Ljubisa Bajic and Jim Keller, the latter of whom left Intel in 2020 after a short two-year stint. Keller's decades of experience come from working at DEC, AMD, Tesla and Apple, where he worked among other things on the Athlon processors, Zen architecture, as well as iPhone's A4 and A5 mobile chips.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/89763-jim-keller-tenstorrent-secures-200-million-new-funding.html

 

[punctualturn]

The man, the legend, the GOAT, Jim Keller!!

Imagine if they do deliver a great product and then Our Holy Lady Dr. Lisa Su buys them!

@sskissing aside, that could be a possible scenario for both the tech and the company, assuming that the tech delivers.

 

[PaleHorse]

Speaking of NVIDIA, Based on my own observations numerous members in various forums experienced technical issues with their laptops. I viewed the system specs of all members who experienced similar issues had some form of NVIDIA prebuilt in their system including my own personal experiences with NVIDIA built into my own personal gaming laptop.

NVIDIA appears to interfere with the prebuilt Intel graphics and caused system freezes and black screens. I had to disable the driver and service and that seemed to resolve the issue as a temporary workaround. The NVIDIA drivers were up to date, and I always check for updates on both the software, and drivers, and the errors still persisted even after the updates were installed. The only solution was to temporarily disable NVIDIA all together, and only enabled the software and driver for use when gaming.

I would advise all members in other forums with similar issues regarding NVIDIA to do the same and that seemed to resolve their issue as well.

 

[PaleHorse]

That's of course going to depend on how well the Tenstorrent AI performs!

 

[Jpe1701]

Speaking of Nvidia, Based on my own observations numerous members in various forums experienced technical issues with their laptops. I viewed the system specs of all members who experienced similar issues had some form of Nvidia prebuilt in their system including my own personal experiences with Nvidia built into my own personal gaming laptop.

Specific Nvidia Geforce models appear to interfere with the prebuilt Intel graphics and caused system freezes and black screens. I had to disable the driver and service and that seemed to resolve the issue as a temporary workaround. The Nvidia drivers were up to date, and I always check for updates on both the software, and drivers, and the errors still persisted even after the updates were installed. The only solution was to temporarily disable Nvidia all together, and only enabled the software and driver for use when gaming.

I would advise all members in other forums with similar issues regarding Nvidia to do the same and that seemed to resolve their issue as well.

The bottom line is Tenstorrent definitely has the advantage over Nvidia. Many consumers may just prefer Tenstorrent over Nvidia anyway due to Nvidia's suspected faulty graphics design with or without AI.

Which GPUs specifically? The current, Ampere generation?

 

[PaleHorse]

I believe it was specific Nvidia Geo Force gaming graphics. I will have to read the CPU type after the gamer is returned. The Dell Inspiron 7559 gamer with Nvidia is at the Dell manufacture for repairs after the CPU, Graphics and SSD failed. I can run the system specs after it is returned just to be sure I read of the correct CPU type.