Simon Knowles is an electrical engineering graduate of the University of Cambridge. He has spent more than 30 years designing processors for new kinds of workloads.
He co-founded Element14, which Broadcom acquired in 2000. He then co-founded Icera, a wireless chip company that Nvidia acquired in 2011.
In 2016 he and Nigel Toon founded Graphcore in Bristol after an incubation period at XMOS. Knowles became chief technology officer and later executive vice president of engineering. He is the original architect of the Colossus IPU, a chip built for machine learning with large amounts of on-chip memory instead of a cache hierarchy.
Graphcore became Europe's first AI chip unicorn in December 2018, valued at $1.7bn after Microsoft and Samsung invested. A late 2020 round of $222m valued it at $2.8bn. In 2022 it had revenue of $2.7m and a net loss of $205m. SoftBank agreed to buy it in July 2024 for about $500m.