Tenstorrent Unveils High-End Wormhole AI Processors, Featuring RISC-V & Phenomenal Price To Performance Value

Tenstorrent has launched its cutting-edge Wormhole high-performance AI chips, featuring the RISC-V architecture & scalability up to a whole new level.

Tenstorrent Makes A Bold Statement In The AI Industry, Unveils High-End Wormhole AI Chips & Dedicated Workstation Offerings

Tenstorrent’s CEO and chip expert Jim Keller is often seen criticizing the likes of NVIDIA with the way the company is moving with the AI hype, so given his firm’s new AI solutions, we expect them to be top-notch, and apparently, the Wormhole AI chips do look highly capable. With the new set of AI processors, Tenstorrent aims to provide a powerful yet cost-effective solution to its consumers that is scalable at the same time as well. Not just AI chips, but Tenstorrent has unveiled workstation solutions dedicated to the new Wormhole platform as well, providing a complete package to potential buyers.

Starting with the Wormhole AI chips, Tenstorrent has decided to offer them as PCIe cards in two different configurations: the Wormhole n150 and the Wormhole n300. The Wormhole n150 comes with a single processor, which features 72 Tensix cores. According to Tenstorrent, each Tensix core features “five RISC-V baby cores,” which allows scalability along with multi-chip development much more effectively.

The processor comes with a 160W TDP and delivers 262 TFLOPS of FP8 performance. Interestingly, the Wormhole n150 add-in card features 12 GB of GDDR6 memory with a bandwidth of 288 GB/s.

The Wormhole n300 features few changes apart from the fact that it holds two processors, hence double the computing power of the n150 and 24 GB of GDDR6 memory.

While on paper, the Wormhole lineup of AI chips might look under-capable, Tenstorrent plans to make its AI products competitive by offering immense scalability, that too natively. This means that multiple Wormhole processors can act as a single unit when in need of unified power, or they can be utilized individually as well, all because of the use of Ethernet, the interconnect, which is highly appreciated by Jim Keller.

Moving on from Wormholes, Tenstorrent has also unveiled new workstations, including the TT-QuietBox, which features AMD’s EPYC processor, liquid cooling, and 4x of the Wormhole n300 AI cards, which means a total of eight processors onboard. The firm is also offering the TT-LoudBox, which comes with Intel’s Xeon architecture and beefed-up specifications, but it doesn’t offer liquid cooling, hence the name “LoudBox.”

Now, moving onto the pricing, Tenstorrent’s Wormhole n150 and the n300 retail for $999 and $1,399, respectively, which is phenomenally cheaper than what market competitors offer. Indeed, the performance difference from products such as NVIDIA’s H100 AI GPUs is quite significant, but considering that the AI chips are available for almost ten times the lesser price, they are worthwhile. For the workstations, the TT-LoudBox goes for $6,000, while the TT-QuietBox retails for $1,500.

Overall, the new products by Tenstorrent are indeed solid and will prove to be beneficial for AI startups or individuals looking for low-to-mid AI computing power on a budget.

News Source: Tenstorrent