Chip Legend Jim Keller Expresses Optimism For Intel Foundry But Says It Needs Work

Among chip nerds, Jim Keller is a name that needs no introduction, but if you aren't familiar, he's a veteran from the days of Digital Equipment Corporation. He contributed directly to the DEC Alpha, the AMD K7 and K8 cores powering the Athlon and original Opteron, and then later came back to AMD to direct the design of Zen, before making his way to Tesla and Intel for short stints as well. He's now running his own shop at Tenstorrent, a chipmaker focused on AI processors. Like most chip companies, Tenstorrent doesn't have its own fabs, so it needs a partner who does to make its chips, and Keller says Intel could be that place—with some work.

More specifically, speaking to Nikkei Asia, Keller said that Tenstorrent is talking to TSMC, Samsung, and Japan's Rapidus for access to 2nm fabrication, but that Intel could also be an option in the future. Nikkei Asia quoted him as saying "they still have a lot of work to do ... to deliver a really solid technology roadmap."

This actually lines up pretty well with the fact that Intel purportedly killed 18A as an option for external orders. If the company simply isn't ready to offer its services to external customers, then it wouldn't make sense to take those orders yet. Intel hasn't talked too much about 14A yet, but Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan remarked that the company absolutely has to get a customer for 14A or it may not be able to continue developing leading-edge process technology anymore. This would seem to indicate that Intel is working hard to prepare 14A for external customers.

Keller said a lot more than that in the interview with Nikkei Asia, but not about Intel. He noted that his company Tenstorrent is one of the first serious chip companies to begin talks with Rapidus, a new startup in Japan that we reported on way back in 2022, before it was named. Rapidus is a collaboration between most of the tech companies in Japan as well as the US' IBM, funded primarily by the Japanese government, to the tune of over $8 billion USD.


IBM actually demonstrated working 2nm chips based on GAAFETs as early as 2021, long before Intel or TSMC were there. IBM was actually also first at 5nm (also with GAAFETs) and 7nm, too, but the company doesn't operate big commercial fabs, so they're primarily focused on simply advancing the science of transistor research. An important partner, for a commercial fab; Rapidus had a pilot line going in July for its upcoming 2nm process, but full mass production isn't planned until 2027.

Tenstorrent is already shipping processors; this isn't a vaporware company. The Blackhole is positioned as a cost-effective and highly scalable alternative to NVIDIA desktop GPUs for AI training and inference. We haven't tested them yet, but reviews and anecdotes from around the web suggest that the strength of the product is in its scalability thanks to integrated networking, but that there are still software struggles, as is so often the case. Even AMD is still fighting that battle, as we noted in our review of the HP Z2 Mini G1a.

_{Jim Keller image ©Impress PC Watch.}