company Element 14. When this was
acquired by Broadcom for $640 million
in 2000, the pair went on to found Icera
in 2002 with Toon, who was previously
vice- president and general manager with
the electrical equipment manufacturer
Altera Europe. When Icera was sold to
NVIDIA, it meant that Knowles had
already exited two chip design startups
at a total value in excess of $1bn. But he
and Toon were far from finished. What
was it that motivated them to start all
over again with Graphcore?
Sitting across the table from one
another in a fifth-floor meeting room at
their Bristol headquarters, the founders
exchange a fleeting glance. After a while
in their company, it’s clear that this
long- established business double-act
has acquired some of the hallmarks of
a marriage: an easy rapport, finishing
each other’s sentences, and occasionally
talking over and correcting each other.
“Simon maybe has a different view,”
says Toon, “but my sense of it is that
this is what we get up in the morning for.
The fact that the opportunity in front of
us is so enormous, I feel like I have been
waiting my whole life for this.”
He adds that it comes down to
purpose: “You might get some satis-
faction from connecting people together
in a social network, for example, or
delivering food to them through an
internet app. What we’re doing is poten-
tially changing the future of compute –
we are potentially allowing lots of people
to create major breakthroughs; maybebest known for spinning out ARM
from Acorn Computers – and was
Graphcore’s first backer. “It was the
£200 million that the Callaghan and,
later, Thatcher governments origi-
nally spent on Inmos that created the
infrastructure and ecosystem around
Bristol that really understood semicon-
ductors. It created brilliant people like
[the leading computer scientist] David
May, and Simon and Nigel. They would
not have been there had it not been for
the government initiative at the time.”
Knowles first came to Bristol in 1989,
to work for Inmos. “Historically, Bristol
has been the centre of chip design [in the
UK], and in many ways ARM and CSR
[formerly Cambridge Silicon Radio]
were anomalies. I mean, successful, large
anomalies, and now everyone associates
Cambridge with chips. But in terms of
the numbers of chip startups, and how
many years back it goes, Bristol is the
dominant place in the UK.”
Graphcore emerged from a tangled
family tree of semiconductor companies.
Toon and Knowles were introduced
by Stan Boland (the former CEO of
computer group Acorn, and now CEO
of autonomous vehicle startup FiveAI),
who had worked with Knowles at chipway!’ – it’s not your typical destination
on your tour of Europe. But to be honest,
it’s been surprising for us in the Bay Area,
because the quality of talent in the UK,
and par ticularly in Bristol in the semicon-
ductor space, is very strong. The team
is on a par with the best in the world.”
Following a $200 million series D
round in December 2018, Graphcore
was most recently valued at $1.7
billion, with investors, innovators
and large corporates now seemingly
convinced it will be the company to
power the AI era in much the same way
as Cambridge-born chip giant ARM
dominated mobile devices, shipping
over 130 billion chips and reaching 70
per cent of the global population. The
opportunity at stake is nothing less
than the future of AI, with applications
ranging from medical advances to auton-
omous vehicles, space exploration and
just about everything in-between.Above: Graphcore’s Colossus GC2
IPU is a new generation of microprocessor
built for the artificial intelligence ageALLPHOTOGRAPHY:NICK^ ROCHOWSKIIn fact, Bristol has a strong history as a
hub for computer hardware engineering,
and its beginnings can be traced back
to 1978 and £50m of seed investment
(another £150m would later follow)
made by the British government in
Inmos – a micro processor startup with
a design centre in Bristol and fabrication
facilities located just across the Severn
estuary in Newport, south Wales.
“We often forget the importance
of government investment,” says
Hermann Hauser, the Austrian-born
entrepreneur and investor who is09-19-FTgraphcore.indd 151 22/07/2019 14:25