[News] Is Tenstorrent Setting Its Sights on NVIDIA? Plans to Utilize Samsung’s 4nm Process for Chiplet Production

As reported by China’s Jiwei on October 2nd, Samsung has revealed that its chip manufacturing division has secured an order from AI chip client Tenstorrent to produce chips utilizing its cutting-edge 4nm process.

Reportedly, the chip being produced by Samsung, known as Quasar, is a chiplet that will be packaged alongside other chiplets. The precise financial details of the transaction, including the amount involved and the quantity of chips to be manufactured, have not been disclosed.

Tenstorrent, a Canadian AI chip startup, was founded in 2016 by a team that included Ivan Hamer (formerly an engineer at AMD), Ljubisa Bajic (previously Director of Integrated Circuit Design at AMD), and Milos Trajkovic (formerly involved in firmware design at AMD). Initially flying under the radar, the company gained more industry attention, especially after Jim Keller, a renowned computer architecture expert often referred to as the “chip guru” with prior stints at Apple, AMD, and Tesla, joined as CTO.

In August of this year, under the leadership of CEO Jim Keller, Tenstorrent successfully completed a $100 million strategic financing round led by Hyundai Motor Group and Samsung Catalyst Fund, with participation from Fidelity Ventures, Eclipse Ventures, Epiq Capital, Maverick Capital, and others. This marked Tenstorrent’s seventh financing round and enjoyed the backing of industry partners Hyundai Motor Group and Samsung, signaling Tenstorrent’s foray into the automotive sector.

Publicly available information suggests that Tenstorrent is one of the challengers to NVIDIA. In 2020, Tenstorrent introduced its proprietary Tensix cores and launched the integrated system Grayskull, with the aim of accelerating AI model training in data centers, public and private clouds, local servers, and edge servers. Today, it is expanding its footprint in various markets, including the automotive industry.

It’s noteworthy that some of Tenstorrent’s chips are designed using open-source architectures like RISC-V, putting them in competition with ARM and x86.

Jim Keller, CEO of Tenstorrent, previously stated, “Tenstorrent’s focus is on developing high performance compute and delivering these solutions to customers around the world.”

(Photo credit: Tenstorrent)