Comment by imtringued
1 day ago
Tenstorrent's Wormhole was garbage for anything other than development.
Blackhole is actually usable. They cost slightly more than a used 3090 Ti with 24 GB VRAM, but they come with 32GB GDDR6 and 4x 800G networking (apparently only blackholes to other blackholes).
Nvidia's datacenter GPUs are at least 4x faster, but they also cost 20 times as much. There's also the fact that they have as much SRAM as Groq LPUs.
There is also another present. You get 16 Ascalon cores per Blackhole card. Yes, you've heard that right. You are getting 16 of the fastest RISC-V cores ever developed for a measily $999 to $1,299.
My only complaint is that they have these insane 300W TDPs.
> You get 16 Ascalon cores per Blackhole card.
No you don't, you get licensed SiFive X280 cores, which are slow in order cores with 512-bit vector registers (dual issue 256-bit ALUs).
See: https://docs.tenstorrent.com/aibs/blackhole/specifications.h...
and the SiFive X280 page: https://www.sifive.com/cores/intelligence-x280
Ascalon "silicon" (aka chips) is instead brought up in the "next 12 month" section.
i.e. We'll see Ascalon soon, just not yet.