Les Kohn

Who is Les Kohn?

Les Kohn co-founded Ambarella Inc. in 2004 along with other

Ambarella founding members to spearhead the development of

next-generation video compression technology.

Prior to

co-founding Ambarella, Kohn was CTO and co-founder at Afara Websystems,

a startup that pioneered the development of throughput-oriented

microprocessor technology optimized for commercial server applications.

After Afara was acquired by Sun Microsystems in 2002, Kohn became a

fellow at Sun where he continued the development of this technology and

helped throughput computing become the primary focus of Sun's roadmap

for its UltraSPARC processors.

Before joining Afara, Kohn was

chief architect of C-Cube Microsystems, where he lead the development

of three generations of digital video codecs, including the first

single-chip MPEG-2 and HD/multi-stream codecs.

Prior to

C-Cube, Kohn was a distinguished engineer at Sun where he was the chief

architect of Sun's first two 64-bit microprocessors: the UltraSPARC I

and II. In addition to these accomplishments, Kohn also served as

chief architect of the Intel i860 and co-architected the National 32000

microprocessor family.

Les Kohn holds a bachelor’s degree in physics from California Institute of Technology.