So cheap! You can now buy two liquid-cooled AI workstations with 192GB of GDDR6 memory for the price of one Nvidia H100 GPU — hardware startup from AMD chip legend runs on RISC-V and promises to disrupt AI market
Tenstorrent, a startup focused on AI and RISC-V processors led by legendary chip architect Jim Keller, the mastermind behind AMD’s Zen architecture, launched its first hardware in March 2024. Grayskull is a RISC-V alternative to GPUs, and the company produced two Grayskull-powered DevKits: the Grayskull e75 and the more powerful Grayskull e150.
The company has now followed up those initial releases with Wormhole, featuring two PCIe boards, the n150s and n300s, featuring flexible, scalable processors built with Tensix Cores. The boards include a compute unit, network-on-chip, local cache, and “baby RISC-V” cores. Tenstorrent says they offer superior performance for the cost compared to traditional GPUs, as well as broad data precision format support.
n150s has more processing power per ASIC (72 Tensix cores), but n300s has two ASICs on the card (128 Tensix cores – 64 per ASIC). While Tenstorrent still sells the Grayskull Dev Kits, it plans to shift its entire focus to Wormhole, which will in turn be replaced by Blackhole next year.
Wormhole Workstations
While you can buy the Wormhole boards separately, Tenstorrent also sells them in pre-built AI workstations with Intel and AMD configurations. TT Speaker comes equipped with dual Intel Xeon 4309Y processors, which can run between 2.8 and 3.6 GHz, supported by 512 GB of RAM and four n300s cards in a 2×4 mesh. This model also features 4 TB of NVMe storage and dual 10 GbE copper Ethernet ports. It is priced at $12,000 and offers optional rack-mounting for easy integration into various IT setups.
Tenstorrent’s other AI workstation, TT-StilleBoxincludes a 16-core AMD EPYC 8124P processor running at speeds between 2.4 and 3.0 GHz, and four liquid-cooled n300s cards in a 2×4 mesh. This version is designed for environments where noise cancellation is crucial, but without sacrificing performance. It also comes with 4TB of NVMe storage and dual 10GbE copper Ethernet ports. The TT-QuietBox is available for $15,000 and is also rack-mountable.
Both units are clearly aimed at professionals who need reliable and powerful computing solutions. ServeTheHome says: “The company’s idea is that by offering eight ASICs in a developer box, they can all be used together for a single developer, or partitioned to support multiple developers simultaneously.”