Legendary microprocessor engineer Jim Keller will join Samsung at its Foundry Forum 2023 later this month, signaling that a partnership with Samsung Electronics might be possible. The last time Jim Keller spoke at Samsung Foundry Forum was in 2021, and a year later, he talked about the future of chip design at the 2022 TSMC OPI Ecosystem Forum.
Later this month, Jim Keller will take the stage at Samsung Foundry Forum to discuss next-generation computing technologies, including AI and the RISC-V instruction set architecture.
This turn of events hints at a possible collaboration between Jim Keller and Samsung Semiconductor. Even more so, given that Samsung CEO Kyung Kye-Hyun mentioned the legendary chip designer during a lecture at Yonsei University on June 9.
“If the whole world uses generative AI, the name of the game is semiconductors that can power AI,” said the head of the Samsung Electronics Device Solutions Division earlier this month. Furthermore, Kyung Kye-Hyun said “We will send our employees to the United States to be trained by great masters like Jim Keller.” (via Business Korea)
Samsung might follow in LG's footsteps
Jim Keller recently gained more attention than usual from the Korean media when his AI semiconductor firm, Tenstorrent, and LG Electronics announced a collaboration in May. LG said it is partnering with Tenstorrent to develop chiplet-based AI semiconductors.
Local news outlets now speculate that Samsung might follow LG and start a collaboration with Jim Keller's firm.
Previously, the chip engineer worked on creating the Zen architecture for AMD. He was also named senior vice president of Technology, System Architecture and Client Group, and head of Silicon Engineering at Intel. His portfolio also includes design work on application processors and autonomous driving systems in collaboration with Apple and Tesla.
Samsung recently announced it is developing an in-house generative AI for its semiconductor employees. The tech giant is designing the system in partnership with Naver. However, Samsung's AI-focused efforts most likely won't stop there, and the company believes memory semiconductors can outperform NVIDIA GPUs. Samsung said it will “make sure that memory semiconductor-centered supercomputers can come out by 2028.”
