Tenstorrent Announces Availability of TT-Ascalon™

Tenstorrent announces TT-Ascalon™, their high-performance RISC-V CPU, available immediately. RISC-V is an open-source instruction set architecture (ISA) specification for computer processors with rapid adoption globally, from embedded systems to high-performance compute. The release of Ascalon introduces the highest performance RISC-V CPU IP in the industry.

Ascalon delivers true high-performance computing capability and exceeds the performance of any existing RISC-V CPU in the market, placing Ascalon firmly in line with leading high-end processors across many alternate proprietary instruction set architectures. Ascalon is backed by industry-standard SPEC CPU benchmarks, achieving more than 22 SPECint® 2006/GHz, >2.3 SPECint® 2017/GHz and >3.6 SPECfp® 2017/GHz and also operates at >2.5 GHz on the Samsung SF4X process node, underscoring its robust design and scalability across advanced technology nodes.

Ascalon provides a complete high-performance solution for a wide range of applications spanning from servers and AI infrastructure to automotive HPC and ADAS. It is fully compatible with the RVA23 profile that includes a high performance RVV1.0 compliant Vector Engine. It includes support for Hardware Virtualization, Advanced Memory Management and Advanced Interrupt Architecture, In addition Ascalon provides support for Security and RAS (reliability, accessibility and serviceability) features including side-channel mitigations.

Tenstorrent is also announcing full support for Ascalon on GCC, LLVM and Qemu that is upstreamed and available for developers and customers to deploy right away. With this release, Tenstorrent gives developers the confidence that software built for RVA23 will run seamlessly on Ascalon and any RVA23 compliant processors.

“RISC-V cores exist for almost every application, but true high performance has been the missing piece until now,” said Aniket Saha, VP of Product Strategy at Tenstorrent. “Ascalon fills that gap as a RISC-V CPU designed for advanced computing, with full export compliance and global availability. We’re seeing strong traction in China and are prioritizing customer needs there, which starts with the release of the global version.”

“With Ascalon, we’re delivering a complete solution that integrates a high-performance core, system IP, an RVA23-compliant toolchain, and comprehensive collateral,” said Divyang Agrawal, VP of RISC-V Cores at Tenstorrent. “This provides customers with the key building blocks to develop platforms ranging from high-performance computing to robotics, and enables developers to expand the RISC-V ecosystem.”

Tenstorrent offers a path to ownership through its Innovation License program, as they recognize that many companies seek to own and customize their IP. This program enables partners to build differentiated and sovereign solutions on top of Tenstorrent’s technology. Additionally, Tenstorrent has established a partnership with CoreLab to drive exceptional customer support and design optimization in the region, and to enable customers to efficiently adopt and ramp up on their IP.

Please contact Tenstorrent to get more information on the immediate availability of Ascalon, alongside many available evaluation and emulation platforms.