Samsung to Fab Risc-V Chips for Tenstorrent
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
AI chip startup Tenstorrent announced on Monday that it will use Samsung's foundry to manufacture its next generation of products, with both partners alluding to potential future RISC-V collaborations.
"Samsung Foundry's commitment to advancing semiconductor technology aligns with our vision for advancing RISC-V and AI and makes them an ideal partner to bring our AI chiplets to market," beamed Tenstorrent CEO Jim Keller.
Samsung's head of US Foundry business echoed those sentiments: "Samsung's advanced silicon manufacturing nodes will accelerate Tenstorrent's innovations in RISC-V and AI for datacenter and automotive solutions."
Tenstorrent hopes to become an alternative to Nvidia for AI hardware. It builds some of its products - such as its 2023 standalone ML computer, Black Hole - on RISC-V CPU cores. Sixteen of them, to be exact.
In June, Samsung announced it was an official member of the RISC-V Software Ecosystem, which develops code to run on open processor architecture.
The current deal for next-gen products, however, has the Korean megalith manufacturing Tenstorrent's Quasar chiplet using Samsung's SF4X process and 4nm architecture.
[...] "We leave the decision to them where the chips get made," said [Tenstorrent vice president of strategy and corporate communications Bob] Grim. The veep noted that his current customers - LG Electronics and Hyundai - are both in Korea.
Samsung is a licensee of Arm processor designs - a rival to RISC-V. Working with Tenstorrent gives Samsung potential exposure to the open processor design that could help it to win more fabrication work from other RISC-V players.
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