Tenstorrent Unveils New Wormhole Development Kits and Powerful AI Workstations

Tenstorrent, an AI chip company led by renowned microprocessor engineer Jim Keller, has just announced new AI development kits and workstations powered by the company’s cutting-edge Wormhole accelerators. Tenstorrent has previously offered development kits (devkits) based on its Grayskull AI processor (and will continue to do so while supplies last), but Wormhole has a newer, more powerful architecture, and this is the first time the company has offered full workstations built around its chips.

Tenstorrent takes a somewhat unique approach to AI acceleration, using the royalty-free RISC-V ISA processor and open-source software stacks. The ultimate goal is to deliver highly scalable, high-performance AI processors with a low barrier to entry and a lower total cost of ownership than competing solutions. But to succeed in AI, developers need to be familiar with chips and software, which is where these new development kits and workstations come in.

Tenstorrent Silicon Roadmap

Tenstorrent’s data center accelerators and these new development kits leverage the same architectures and work in similar ways, so developing on one of these new cards or workstations and scaling to the cloud should be fairly straightforward. The key is getting the development kits into the hands of developers.

“It’s always rewarding to get more of our products into the hands of developers. Bringing development systems with our Wormhole board to market helps developers scale and work on multi-chip AI software,” said Jim Keller, CEO of Tenstorrent. “In addition to this launch, we’re thrilled that the release and power-up of our second generation, Blackhole, is going very well.”

Blackhole is Tenstorrent’s next-generation autonomous AI computer, which will feature 140 of the company’s Tensix++ cores, 16 CPU cores, and a range of high-speed connectivity. Blackhole will offer up to 790 TOPS of compute performance with the FP8 data type, but it’s not expected to arrive until a little later. Wormhole — the basis of these new development kits and workstations — is manufactured on a 12nm process node, features 80 of Tenstorrent’s Tensix+ cores, 16 x 100Gb Ethernet links, 6 channels of DDR6 memory, 16 lanes of PCIe Gen 4 connectivity. Wormhole actually has fewer cores than Grayskull, but it uses a more advanced microarchitecture and offers significantly more performance — 328 TOPS versus 276 TOPS.

The TT-Loudbox and TT-QuietBox are Tenstorrent’s first workstations

Tenstorrent is offering two Wormhole-based boards, the N150 and N300, and two workstations, the TT-LoudBox and TT-QuietBox. The N150 features a single Wormhole chip, while the N300 features two chips. They will be priced at $1,000 and $14,000, respectively. The TT-LoudBox and TT-QuietBox will both feature four N300s for a total of eight Wormhole chips in a 2×4 mesh per system, in addition to 512GB of RAM, 4TB of NVMe storage, and dual 10Gb Ethernet. Both systems are also optionally rack-mountable, but that’s where the similarities end. The $12,000 TT-LoudBox is air-cooled and features a pair of 8-core Intel Xeon processors, while the $15,000 TT-QuietBox is liquid-cooled and features a single 16-core AMD EPYC processor. As for how loud or quiet the systems are, actual decibel measurements weren’t available, but I was told they’re akin to powerful PC systems, not big-rig servers.

The N150, N300 and TT-LoudBox are available on the Tenstorrent website now. The TT-QuietBox is also listed, but it is available for pre-order and will not start shipping for another 8-10 weeks.