Simon Knowles is a silicon engineer and entrepreneur. His work is in domain-specific processors, yielding 14 production chips over 40 years in the domains of video decoding, wire and radio signal processing, parallel supercomputing, and artificial intelligence. He has made contributions to processor architecture, computer arithmetic, structured silicon design methods, and parallel processing.
Simon has co-founded three silicon companies in England. Element-14, founded in 1998 and sold in 2001, produced DSL processors to bring broadband internet to homes over old telephone lines. These designs still power most DSL infrastructure worldwide. Icera Semiconductor, founded in 2002 and sold in 2011, produced the first cellular radio baseband processors, to bring the internet to laptops and mobile phones. Graphcore, founded in 2014, produces AI supercomputers based on its Colossus intelligence processor, the first bulk-synchronous massively parallel processor and one of the earliest designs for the new domain of machine learning. Graphcore's first Colossus contained 24 billion transistors, a record for logic chip complexity in 2018. Its successor reached 60 billion transistors in 2020 and was the first wafer-stacked 3D logic chip.
Simon continues to develop computing for AI as CTO of Graphcore. He is an EST graduate of Churchill College, Cambridge University.
Professional position
- CTO and EVP Engineering, Graphcore Ltd
Subject groups
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Computer Sciences
Artificial intelligence, machine learning, vision, Numerical computing
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Engineering and Materials Science
Computer engineering (including software), Engineering, semiconductors
