Jim Kellerthe legendary chip designer, architect of the “relaunch” of AMD and the success that followed after the creation of the innovative Ryzen platform, has announced that his company is ready to bring an alternative to the market Traditional GPUs.
After having “militated” in the ranks of AMD, Tesla and Intel, Keller joined the startup Tenstorrenta company specialized in the creation of chips forartificial intelligencetaking on the role of CEO starting from January 2023.
What is Tenstorrent Grayskull and how does it work
Today Tenstorrent sets a real milestone by presenting Grayskull, a RISC-V alternative to classic GPUs designed to be easier to program and scale. The new chip reportedly excels in the field of run-time sparsity. This is a condition that occurs during the execution of a program or algorithm, in which information may be sparsely distributed. Grayskull seems to be particularly suited to dealing with this type of situation, allowing for effective management of scattered data while performing calculations. The “data sparsity” refers to data shortages or missing elements within a data set or when performing an operation.
Grayskull would be just as good in the conditional computation that is, in carrying out certain operations or calculations only when specific conditions are met.
The company led by Keller also presented the first chip models: Grayskull e75 and the most powerful Grayskull e150. Both are hardware for managing operations inference in the context of artificial intelligence projects. Supplied together with the software TT-Buda e TT-Metalthe first is used to immediately run the models (the supported ones are indicated on this GitHub page), while the second is for users who want customize the templates or write new ones.
What the new chips for artificial intelligence look like
The Grayskull e75 is a low-profile, half-length PCIe Gen 4 card with a single processor; runs at 75W. The most advanced e150 model is a full-height, 3/4-length PCIe Gen 4 card containing a Grayskull processor that runs at up to 200W and is capable of balancing power and throughput.
Tenstorrent chips are based on an array of cores known as Tensix Core and they are equipped with communication hardware so that they can exchange data with each other directly, without going through DRAM.
I development kit for Grayskull support a wide range of models, including BERT for natural language processing tasks, ResNet for image recognition, Whisper for speech recognition and translation, YOLOv5 for real-time object detection e U-Net for image segmentation.
The e75 and e150 versions are already available for purchase at $599 and $799 respectively.
The historic presentation by Tenstorrent comes following the signing of an important contract with the Leading-edge Semiconductor Technology Center (LSTC) of Japan. Specifically, Tenstorrent solutions based on RISC-V technology and on chiplets engineered within the startup led by Keller (therefore with all the intellectual property added by the latter), will be used to create a AI accelerator cutting-edge 2nm technology, with the ultimate goal of revolutionizing AI computing performance in Japan.