Tenstorrent to Use Samsung’s SF4X for Quasar Low-Price AI Chiplet

Tenstorrent this week introduced that it had chosen to make use of Samsung’s SF4X (4 nm-class) course of know-how for its upcoming low-cost, low-power codenamed Quasar chiplet for machine studying workloads. The chiplets shall be made at Samsung’s new fab close to Taylor, Texas when it turns into operational in 2024.

Tenstorrent’s Quasar chiplet is a brand new addition to the corporate’s roadmap. Based mostly on a picture supplied by the corporate, the chiplet is about to pack at the very least 80 Tensix cores primarily based on the RISC-V instruction set structure and tailor-made to run synthetic intelligence workloads in quite a lot of codecs, corresponding to BF4, BF8, INT8, FP16, and BF16. Tenstorrent’s Quasar’s are designed to function in teams and be paired with the corporate’s CPU chiplets, so they’re geared up with non-blocking die-to-die interfaces.

Samsung’s SF4X is a course of know-how designed for high-performance computing functions. It’s tailor-made for top clocks and excessive voltages to make sure most efficiency.

Tenstorrent doesn’t disclose the estimated efficiency of its Quasar chiplet, however assuming that it has 80 Tensix cores, which is similar quantity because the Wormhole chiplet taking a 328 FP8 TOPS efficiency, we are able to most likely make an analogous estimate of the efficiency, contemplating that it’s made utilizing a performance-enhanced course of know-how.

Tenstorrent formally positions its Quasar chiplets as a low-power, low-cost answer for machine studying, so we are able to solely wonder if the corporate will attempt to squeeze each final little bit of efficiency out of them or select a unique energy technique.

“Samsung Foundry is increasing within the U.S., and we’re dedicated to serving our clients with one of the best out there semiconductor know-how,” stated Marco Chisari, head of Samsung’s U.S. Foundry enterprise. “Samsung’s superior silicon manufacturing nodes will speed up Tenstorrent’s improvements in RISC-V and AI for knowledge middle and automotive options. We sit up for working collectively and serving as Tenstorrent’s foundry accomplice.“

One attention-grabbing wrinkle about Tenstorrent’s relationship with Samsung is that it lately secured $100 million in financing from numerous firms in a spherical co-led by Hyundai Motor Group and the Samsung Catalyst Fund. Hyundai and Samsung want AI processors in a single kind or one other, so it isn’t stunning that their funds are invested in Tenstorrent. In the meantime, and I’m speculating right here, the identical applies to chipmaking, and Samsung could also be all for producing chips for Tenstorrent for strategic causes.