AI start-up Tenstorrent has announced the commercial release of its Wormhole processors, built to power AI accelerators to compete with Nvidia. Wormhole will power the new Wormhole n150 and n300 AI accelerators, as well as the TT-LoudBox and TT-QuietBox workstations containing four n300s.
The Wormhole n150 and n300 AI accelerators are 3/4 size PCIe add-in cards based on the Wormhole processor. The n150 has a single Wormhole processor and the N300 holds a pair. The cards are Tenstorrent's second line of dev kits, replacing the Grayskull boards powered by the chip of the same name. Both Wormholes are passively cooled, and operate at up to 160W and 300W respectively.
The Wormhole processors are based on the Tensix core created by Tenstorrent. Each Tensix Core contains what Tenstorrent describes as "five 'baby RISC-V' microprocessors, " with hardware and software support to effortlessly scale up with other Tensix cores across multiple Wormhole chips.
This native scalability is part of what Tenstorrent hopes will allow it to claim market space away from Nvidia, which controls 80% of the AI accelerator market. Wormhole processors have been around since 2021, and are only seeing a full developer roll-out now for unknown reasons.
Wormhole processors can scale up or down depending on the needs of the end user. In a typical workstation solution with four Wormhole n300 cards, the Wormholes can combine to act as one single processor, looking like a single massive network of Tensix cores to software. The accelerators in a single workstation can also split across to four developers, or run eight unique AI models concurrently. Key to the success of this scaling is that it supposedly does not require virtualization, performing all scaling natively.
Tenstorrent's preferred way to get Wormhole n300s into the hands of developers is with its pair of prebuilt workstations, the TT-LoudBox and TT-QuietBox. Containing four n300 cards for a total of eight Wormhole processors, the TT-LoudBox is also powered by two Intel Xeon 4309Y 8-core processors, 512GB RAM, 4TB NVME storage, and twin 10 GbE copper ethernet. Available as a tower or rack-mounted, the LoudBox costs $12,000 and is available today.
For those looking for a liquid-cooled experience, Tenstorrent will offer the TT-QuietBox, available today for pre-order. Four Wormhole n300s inside will be complemented by a single AMD EPYC 8124P 16-core CPU, with all other specs the same now under liquid cooling. The price tag will rise to $15,000.
CEO Jim Keller has been chasing the Nvidia whale for years as head of Tenstorrent. "It’s always rewarding to get more of our products into developer hands," shared Keller in a press release. "Releasing development systems with our Wormhole card helps developers scale up and work on multi-chip AI software."
The industry pro has enjoyed a lengthy career across many companies, including Apple, where he designed the M1 chip, AMD, Intel, and Tesla, before landing as CEO of Tenstorrent seeking to take on Nvidia's near-monopoly over AI compute. The company, which is set to release the second-gen Blackhole in early 2025, will hope to beat the firmly entrenched Nvidia by serving edge use cases and fringe needs that Nvidia can't meet.
