Tenstorrent introduces Blackhole AI accelerators based on RISC-V architecture

Canadian startup Tenstorrent has announced the Blackhole family of AI accelerators, which are designed as dual-slot expansion cards with a PCI Express 5.0 x16 interface. In addition, the TT-QuietBox workstation equipped with these products has debuted.

Recall that Tenstorrent previously released Wormhole AI accelerators with 72 and 128 Tensix cores, each of which contains five RISC-V cores. The GDDR6 memory capacity is 12 and 24 GB, respectively. Performance reaches 262 and 466 Tflops on FP8 operations.

Image source: Tenstorrent

The Blackhole family includes the p100a and p150a/p150b models. The former has 120 Tensix cores, 16 “large” RISC-V cores, 180 MB of SRAM, and 28 GB of GDDR6 memory with a bandwidth of 448 GB/s. The p150a/p150b products are equipped with 140 Tensix cores, 16 “large” RISC-V cores, 210 MB of SRAM, and 32 GB of GDDR6 memory with a bandwidth of 512 GB/s. The power consumption of all accelerators reaches 300 W. The clock frequency of the AI ​​block is 1.35 GHz. The dimensions of the cards are 42×270×111 mm. The p100a and p150a models are equipped with active cooling, the p150b version is passive. The p150a/p150b accelerators are equipped with four QSFP-DD 800G connectors.

The new TT-QuietBox workstation has four Blackhole p150 cards on board. The basis is the ASRock Rack SIENAD8-2L2T motherboard and the AMD EPYC 8124P (Siena) processor with 16 cores (32 threads) with a clock frequency of up to 3 GHz. The amount of DDR5-4800 ECC RDIMM RAM is 256 GB (8 × 32 GB). A 4 TB SSD with a PCIe 4.0 x4 (NVMe) interface is installed. There are two 10GbE RJ45 (Intel X710-AT2 controller) and 1GbE RJ45 (Intel i210) network ports, four USB 3.1 Gen1 Type-A ports (two in the front and two in the back), an analog D-Sub connector.

The Blackhole p100 accelerator is offered for about $1,000, while both modifications of the Blackhole p150 are priced at $1,300. The TT-QuietBox Blackhole workstation will cost $12,000.