RISC-V chip designer Tenstorrent has won $693 million of investment – an endorsement of its plans to use the permissively licensed instruction set architecture for workloads like AI.The Santa Clara-based AI infrastructure biz, led by semiconductor guru Jim Keller, has been developing AI accelerators based on the RISC-V CPU instruction set architecture going back to 2016.
Tenstorrent claims the part is capable of delivering peak AI compute performance of 745 teraFLOPS at FP8 making it a hair faster than Nvidia's A100 and L40S accelerators – albeit with less memory. Each Blackhole part features 32GB of GDDR6 memory and an Ethernet interconnect capable of 1TB/sec of bandwidth.
Tenstorrent's compute platforms have proven compelling enough to convince a wide variety of venture funds to throw their weight behind the business. Of course Samsung's involvement in the venture is a tad self-serving as the South Korean megacorp's foundry unit is one of Tenstorrent's fab partners.