Oral History of Jim Keller

Interviewed by Douglas Fairbairn on 2024-07-08 in Mountain View, CA
© Computer History Museum

Jim Keller is a legendary computer architect. He has designed or impacted virtually every major computer architecture from the 1970’s through 2024. Jim was born in 1958 in Pennsylvania as the son of a mechanical engineer. He was dyslexic and didn’t learn to read until the end of the third grade, but later became a voracious reader. He went on to Penn State because a girl he liked was enrolled there and majored in EE with a minor in philosophy.

Upon graduation he went to work at Harris Semiconductor in Florida, which seemed attractive in that he could live on the beach and surf. That job turned out to be a dead end, so he found an ad for a job at Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC) and quickly found a far more interesting position. It was here that he got an introduction to computer architecture, working on the VAX 8800 along with Bob Stewart, a senior architect on several generations of DEC computers. Jim ended up staying at DEC for 15 years, working on mid-range systems, high end systems, DEC’s Western Research Labs, and eventually joining the semiconductor group where he worked on the Alpha chip.
When his time played out at DEC, he moved to the west coast to work at AMD, on the K7 and K8 chips, both X86 compatible architectures competing with Intel. After three years at AMD, he spent a short time at a startup, but quickly moved on to SiByte, where an old colleague from DEC was CEO. The project there was to build a networking processor that attracted the interest of Broadcom, which later bought the company.

After some time at Broadcom, he joined another startup to focus on the PowerPC architecture. That company, P.A. Semi, was in turn purchased by Apple. Jim spent four years at Apple before first returning to AMD, then on to Tesla, Intel and finally Tenstorrent.

As of 2024, Jim was CEO of Tenstorrent, a company building a massively parallel compute chip aimed at the solving the AI computation bottleneck.

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Catalog Number: 102809020
Acquisition Number: 2024.0071