Tenstorrent to help design 2nm edge AI accelerator in Japan
Tenstorrent Inc. (Toronto, Canada) has announced a partnership with Japan’s Leading-edge Semiconductor Technology Center (LSTC) to develop an edge AI accelerator.
To support the deal Tenstorrient will open a chip design center in Japan.
Under the terms of the deal LSTC is licensing high-performance RISC-V processor technology from Tenstorrent in the form of chiplets to be manufactured by Japan’s Rapidus Corp. foundry. In addition to the IP licensing portion of this deal, Tenstorrent will work with LSTC to provide engineering and design services. LSTC will provide AI chiplets while Tenstorrent will provide RISC-V, LPDDR6 and I/O chiplets. Tenstorrent will be responsible for both the physical and logical definition of the multi-die component and interface standards.
Rapidus is set to provide not only wafer processing but also advanced packaging to the collaboration. When completed the heterogeneous AI accelerator is expected to capable of both training and inference tasks.
Tenstorrent will use its Ascalon RISC-V CPU core technology as the basis for a RISC-V CPU chiplet for LSTC’s edge AI accelerator.
“I am very pleased that this collaboration started as an actual project from the MOC conclusion with Tenstorrent last November,” said Atsuyoshi Koike, CEO of Rapidus, in a statement issued by Tenstorrent (see Tenstorrent partners with Rapidus to develop edge AI cores).
David Bennett, chief customer officer of Tenstorrent, said: “It is with great pleasure that I also announce that Tenstorrent will be opening a high performance compute design center in Japan to support not only this project and our customers, but also to help nurture and develop the future of Japan’s high performance compute industry.”
A spokesperson for Tenstorrent said similar collaborations to the one with LSTC are under discussion in Europe and Korea.
The company declined to say how many engineers would be employed at the Japanese design center. IC designers familiar with high-performance computing are now relatively few in Japan as they are in Europe.
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