Tenstorrent unveils RISC-V chip TT-Ascalon S for agent AI

Tenstorrent, led by chip designer Jim Keller, launched the RISC-V CPU core TT-Ascalon S in Tokyo, Japan. This new chip balances performance and size, offering 70% of the flagship Ascalon X's performance at half the area, boosting performance per area by 1.4 times.

The core is a 4-wide out-of-order design with a 256b vector unit and 32KB instruction cache. It can expand to 8 cores per cluster and is optimized for agent AI, handling mixed, branch-heavy tasks better.

Tenstorrent also showed their Galaxy Blackhole cluster: it runs Kimi K2.6 at 900 tokens per second per user, three times faster than GPU; DeepSeek-R1-0528 671B at over 400 tokens; and generates 6-second 24fps video four times faster than GPU on LTX 2.3 Fast.