AMD’s Zen Godfather to Develop Breakthrough RISC-V Chips with Elite Intel Veterans

Jim Keller, a legendary CPU designer and CEO of chip designer Tenstorrent, announced this week that he has joined the board of directors of AheadComputing, a startup that is developing “breakthrough” RISC-V-based application processors. The startup was founded by Intel veterans who worked in the Advanced Architecture Development Group, an elite team of Intel engineers.

Image source: Tenstorrent

«I am very happy to announce that I am joining the board of directors of AheadComputing. Debbie Marr is the CEO, she is amazing. We are making the RISC-V ecosystem rich, broad and robust. CPU, AI, IP and software support. Open RISC-V is where you can innovate. Without limits,” Jim Keller wrote on his X social media page.

The founding team of AheadComputing previously worked in Intel’s Advanced Architecture Development Group (AADG) and was involved in the development of several generations of the company’s desktop, notebook, and server processors. They specialized in designing processor microarchitecture, memory controllers, and performance optimization for AI and machine learning workloads.

Given the backgrounds of AheadComputing’s co-founders, as well as comments from Jim Keller, the company will likely focus on developing solutions for AI, high-performance computing (HPC), and IP licensing, which is largely in line with Tenstorrent’s focus. AheadComputing has stated that one of its goals is to create processor cores that perform better than its competitors, a goal that is shared by all leading processor makers, including Apple, AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm.

AheadComputing was founded last year by four Intel veterans: Debbie Marr, Jonathan Pearce, Srikanth Srinivasan and Mark Dechene. Marr serves as the company’s CEO.

Debbie Marr joined Intel in 1988 as a design engineer for the Super VGA graphics accelerator. In 1989, she joined the team that designed the Intel 386SL processor, Intel’s first laptop processor. She is one of the architects of the Intel Pentium Pro processor (the company’s first server processor), multiple generations of Pentium 4 (Willamette, Foster, Prescott), and the revolutionary Nehalem architecture. Marr also contributed to the development of Intel Hyper-Threading Technology. She subsequently became the chief architect of Intel Haswell and Intel Ice Lake processors. In 2019, she became the chief architect of AADG, leading the division until mid-2024, when she left Intel to found AheadComputing. Jim Keller worked at Intel during the same period that Marr led AADG.

The other founders of AheadComputing were also involved in the development of various high-performance and energy-efficient microarchitectures for Intel processors, including Nehalem, Haswell, Broadwell, and Tremont. Jonathan Pearce, in turn, led a research project to create a “microprocessor architecture with breakthrough performance for AI/ML/HPC algorithms.” Overall, AheadComputing has assembled a highly skilled team of engineers who have made significant contributions to the creation of some of the best CPUs in history, as well as to the development of AI chip and GPU architectures.

AheadComputing previously announced that it had raised $21.5 million in seed funding to develop a new silicon architecture designed for AI, cloud, and edge workloads. Investors include Eclipse Ventures, Maverick Capital, Fundomo, EPIQ Capital Group, and Jim Keller. The company plans to use the funding to expand its engineering team and accelerate the development of its core technology. AheadComputing currently has about 40 employees.