Tenstorrent Blackhole PCI Express Cards
Tenstorrent is proud to release firmware for Blackhole PCIe AI accelerator cards powered by the Zephyr Real-Time Operating System. Following our commitment to providing the best hardware, tools, and developer experience to our customers, partners, and the Open Source Community, we believe that embracing the Open Source development model is key to empowering everyone to build the next generation of AI applications with the best silicon available.
Of possibly historical note, we believe Blackhole to be the world’s first consumer-focused PCIe AI accelerator card that is also a Zephyr-based product.
Own your Silicon Future.
Product Family
The Blackhole product family officially supported by this repository include the following revisions:
Blackhole P100 (aka “Scrappy” - an internal development board)
Blackhole P100A
Blackhole P150A
Blackhole P150B
Blackhole P150C
Blackhole P300A
Blackhole P300B
Blackhole P300C
Blackhole Galaxy
Additional boards in the Blackhole product family may be added in the future as they are announced.
Overview
The Blackhole SoC is Tenstorrent’s third-generation AI accelerator SoC, packing up to
140 Tensix™ cores
8 GDDR6 channels for 3.5 Tb/s of throughput
32 GB of on-board GDDR6 memory
4 QSFP-DD ports at 800 Gb/s
16 PCIe 5.0 lanes for 500 Gb/s of throughput
See the Blackhole Product Page for additional details and specifications.
Blackhole firmware is built for two targets:
System Management Controller (SMC): the ARC cluster in the Blackhole SoC
Device Management Controller (DMC): an external ARM microcontroller
DMC firmware is mainly responsible for power-on, fan control, some telemetry, SMBus communication, and other board-level management functions.
SMC firmware focuses on management of high-speed I/O (i.e PCIe, GDDR, and Ethernet), power management, frequency scaling, thermal management, host communication over PCIe and other chip-level functionality.
Hardware
Supported Features
Note
Some drivers not specific to Tenstorrent hardware may be located in the main Zephyr git repository.
Note
Some components are in the process of being migrated to Zephyr’s driver model, and are
currently implemented in the lib/tenstorrent/bh_arc
library.
Building
SMC firmware can be built using the standard Zephyr build system. For other apps, tests, and samples, simply point the build system to the desired app directory.
west build -b tt_blackhole@p100a/tt_blackhole/smc <tt_zephyr_platforms>/app/smc
west flash -r tt_flash --force
The tt-console
app is a terminal-emulator-like utility that can be used to view log messages
and interact with the Zephyr shell.
# Build the TT console utility (for board communication)
make -j -C scripts/tooling OUTDIR=/tmp tt-console
# Reset the board and refresh PCIe connectivity
tt-smi -r
./scripts/rescan-pcie.sh
# Connect to the board console
/tmp/tt-console
Press Ctrl-x,a
to exit the tt-console
app.
Debugging
Tenstorrent has developed a custom adapter board to facilitate debugging firmware running on the Blackhole SMC and DMC.
Details coming soon!