Tenstorrent's Blackhole chips boast 768 RISC-V cores and almost as many FLOPS RISC-V champion Tenstorrent offered the closest look yet at its upcoming Blackhole AI accelerators at Hot Chips this week, which they claim can outperform an Nvidia A100 in raw compute and scalability. Each Blackhole chip boasts 745 teraFLOPS of FP8 performance (372 teraFLOPS at FP16), 32GB of GDDR6 memory and an Ethernet- …
...and it's getting pretty old. Now if I could get a RISC-V box with enough threads, PCIe lanes, and 10Gbs NICs for my storage server that would be another story. I would pay actual money for that. As it is Tenstorrent will only see my cash if I am a customer of their customer's customer.
Those 700 Baby RISC-V cores, spread over 140 Tensix cores, look to me like a great use case for RISC-V (rather than forcibly shoehorning them into the roles of servers' main CPUs, in datacenters). It's an ant-colony type of systolic processor imho, perfect for dataflow engines with processing evenly sprinkled about in a decentralized distributed memory landscape, of highly responsive SRAM.
Glad to see Tenstorrent figured out the software transformation stack and compiler needed to lower the corresponding computational graphs and map them efficiently to their stellar hardware!
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