Jim Keller joins ex-Intel chip designers in RISC-V startup focused on breakthrough CPUs

Jim Keller, a legendary CPU designer and the chief executive of Tenstorrent, this week announced that he had joined the board of directors of AheadComputing, a startup formed by ex-Intel engineers that develops 'breakthrough' application processors based on the RISC-V instruction set architecture. AheadComputing was established by Intel veterans working at the Advanced Architecture Development Group, the crème-de-la-crème of Intel engineers.

"Happy to announce I am on the board of AheadComputing," Jim Keller wrote in an X post. "Debbie Marr is the CEO, she is great. We are making the RISC-V ecosystem, rich, broad, and solid. CPUs, AI, support IP, and software. Open RISC-V is where you can innovate. Unconstrained."

AheadComputing's founding team used to work at Intel's Advanced Architecture Development Group (AADG). It shaped multiple Intel CPU generations spanning desktops, laptops, and servers while specializing in CPU microarchitecture, performance, memory controllers, and even AI/ML workloads.

Given the expertise of its co-founders and Jim Keller's comments, AheadComputing seems likely to specialize in AI and HPC and support IP, which resembles the focus of Jim Keller's Tenstorrent. The company indicates that one of its goals is to develop CPU cores that excel in per-core performance, which is a focus of virtually all CPU developers today, including Apple, AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm.

AheadComputing was founded last year by four Intel veterans: Debbie Marr (now CEO), Jonathan Pearce, Srikanth Srinivasan, and Mark Dechene. Together, they worked at Intel for about a century.

Debbie Marr had an extraordinary career at Intel. She joined 1988 as a design engineer for Intel's Super VGA graphics accelerator and then switched to the Intel 386SL processor, the company's first laptop CPU, in 1989. She was also one of the architects of Intel Pentium Pro (the company's first server processor), numerous Pentium 4 generations (Willamette, Foster, Prescott), and Intel's breakthrough Nehalem architecture.

Marr also developed Intel's Hyper-Threading technology while working on various Pentium 4 iterations. She then became the chief CPU architect for Intel Haswell and Intel Icelake, from pathfinding to execution. In 2019, she became the chief architect of AADG and led it until mid-2024, when she left to found AheadComputing. Jim Keller worked at Intel during Marr's tenure at AADG.

Other founding team members also worked on various of Intel's high-performance and energy-efficient CPU microarchitectures, including Nehalem, Haswell, Broadwell, and Tremont. Meanwhile, Jonathan Pearce led a proof-of-concept research project of an innovative 'microprocessor architecture with breakthrough performance for AI/ML/HPC algorithms.' Overall, AheadComputing has a very experienced team that used to work on some of the best CPUs ever designed and contributed to developing AI and GPU architectures.

Earlier this month, AheadComputing announced that it had secured $21.5 million in initial funding to develop a new microprocessor architecture designed to handle workloads for AI, cloud computing, and edge devices. Investors include Eclipse Ventures, Maverick Capital, Fundomo, EPIQ Capital Group, and Jim Keller. With this funding, AheadComputing plans to expand its engineering team and accelerate the development of its core technology. At present, the company has around 40 employees.

"As esteemed former senior Intel CPU architects, AheadComputing's leadership team is uniquely equipped to solve the complex challenges facing today's computing industry," said Greg Reichow, Partner at Eclipse. "Their commitment to delivering the highest performance cores — while ensuring energy efficiency — will significantly impact multiple industries like mobile, industrial and networking."