Jim Keller, chief government officer of Tenstorrent, shared the corporate’s efficiency forecasts for CPUs primarily based on its personal Ascalon processor core in comparison with opponents, together with AMD’s Zen 5, Amazon’s Graviton 3, and Nvidia’s Grace. Tenstorrent’s Ascalon is projected to supply market-leading integer performance-per-watt, however what attracted plenty of consideration is that Tenstorrent expects AMD’s Zen 5 to be the efficiency champion in uncooked integer throughput. In truth, Keller predicts that AMD’s Zen 5 can be 30% sooner than the current-gen Zen 4 in integer workloads.
Jim Keller shared the corporate’s efficiency projections for Tenstorrent’s in-house-designed 8-wide out-of-order execution Ascalon RISC-V core towards potential opponents within the SPEC CPU 2017 INT Fee benchmark that measures integer efficiency.
The corporate expects its Ascalon 1.9 SPEC2K17INT/GHz to hit 7.03 factors and its Ascalon 2.2 SPEC2K17INT/GHz to hit 8.14 factors. Tenstorrent’s efficiency expectations for its personal CPUs have been revealed on the Nerds Speaking to Nerds About RISC-V occasion in India.
Such outcomes put Tenstorrent’s upcoming CPU core comfortably forward of Intel’s Sapphire Rapids (7.45 factors), Nvidia’s Grace (7.44 factors) and AMD’s Zen 4 (6.80 factors). But, AMD’s Zen 5 is projected to hit 8.84 factors, which is able to make it absolutely the integer efficiency champion in 2024 – 2025.
There’s a main catch with Tenstorrent’s efficiency expectations: they’re all projections certainly and never actual and even simulated benchmarks, Tenstorrent advised Tom’s {Hardware}. Whereas we will count on engineers from Tenstorrent to precisely mannequin the efficiency of their very own CPU design and attempt to predict what AMD may supply subsequent, these are nonetheless projections, not precise benchmark outcomes.
For apparent causes, AMD’s Zen 5 efficiency quantity has attracted essentially the most consideration although it’s extremely unlikely that this projection is totally correct. However what is maybe extra necessary is that Tenstorrent expects AMD’s Zen 5 to run north of 4.0 GHz and have a TDP south of 250W, versus Ascalon working at round 3.80 GHz at a TDP of roughly 200W.
If energy consumption is taken into consideration, it appears to be like like processors primarily based on Tenstorrent’s Ascalon microarchitecture (akin to the corporate’s personal Aegis chiplet) will certainly supply main integer performance-per-watt, which is especially necessary for the forms of purposes the processor is designed to fulfill.