Tenstorrent is an AI and RISC-V processor startup that is perhaps best known for attracting a lot of hardware talent. Often, folks focus on Jim Keller who is the company’s CEO and has overseen chip designs from companies like Apple, Tesla, AMD, and Intel. His new venture is Tenstorrent that is aiming to use RISC-V to disrupt the AI server market. To that end, the company has its “Wormhole” PCIe developer kits on sale.
Tenstorrent Wormhole Developer Kits Launched
The company has two main cards as part of its Wormhole generation. The n150s and n300s. The n150s has more compute per ASIC, but the n300s has two ASICs on the card. Tenstorrent’s architecture uses Tensix cores that are RISC-V derived along with GDDR6 memory, sizable local SRAM caches, and high-speed Ethernet as the interconnect. On the n300s, for example, there is a local 400GbE link.
Of course, having a card is great for folks who have systems and want to try developing on the architecture.
Another way that the company has set to sell the cards is in pre-built workstations. There is a dual Intel Xeon Silver (Ice Lake) system with four of the n300s cards ($1400 each.) Stepping up to the liquid-cooled variant we have an AMD EPYC “Siena” platform also with four of the cards. It would be interesting to see if we have reviewed the motherboards in the platforms yet since we have a ton of Siena content at this point.
The company’s idea is that by offering eight ASICs in a developer box they can all be used together for a single developer, or be partitioned to support multiple developers at a time.
Another advantage is that at $18K one gets an entire system with 96GB of GDDR6 across the cards. That is not far off from two NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada Generation GPUs. (See updated pricing via an Amazon Affiliate Link.) There is room for companies to provide solutions at a lower cost than NVIDIA.
Final Words
One of the biggest challenges is getting AI developers to transition to non-NVIDIA hardware. Many want to do so since there are enormous cost-saving opportunities. The big question becomes which solutions are worth investing in. The new Wormhole generation gives developers access to an alternative architecture from folks who know how to build chips. Let us be clear, Wormhole developer kits are not going to dethrone NVIDIA’s AI dominance this week. At the same time, they provide an easy way for folks to try a new architecture. It also puts Tenstorrent in a different class from vaporware AI silicon startups.
Our suggestion is that if you want to look at Tenstorrent, read over their docs, and then look at getting one of these developer kits first.
Except July 19 is Friday…