Tenstorrent Inc., a semiconductor startup led by prominent engineer Jim Keller, is partnering with LG Electronics Inc. to develop a set of new chiplets.

The companies announced the partnership today. They hope to use the chiplets that will be developed through the collaboration to build processors for data centers, smart TVs and vehicles.

Toronto-based Tenstorrent received a $1 billion valuation in 2021 after raising more than $200 million from investors. It’s led by Chief Executive Officer Jim Keller, a prominent chip engineer who was previously Intel Corp.’s vice president of silicon engineering. He earlier held senior technical roles at Apple Inc., Advanced Micro Devices Inc. and other major tech firms.

Tenstorrent has developed a chip called Grayskull that is optimized to run artificial intelligence models. According to the company, the chip is easier to program than graphics cards and also offers certain other benefits. Alongside Grayskull, Tenstorrent sells a central processing unit designed for use in AI servers.

Chiplets, the focus of Tenstorrent’s new partnership with LG, are semiconductor modules used to build processors. Some chiplets contain CPUs circuits geared toward general-purpose computing tasks. Others are optimized for more specific use cases, such as running AI models.

Semiconductor companies often combine several different types of chiplets in a single processor. Intel, AMD and a number of other market players are already using the technology as the basis of their newest products.

Through its partnership with LG, Tenstorrent plans to develop chipsets for three different use cases. The companies will build compute modules optimized to run AI models and video codecs, programs used to change the format of video files. Additionally, they intend to build CPU chiplets based on RISC-V, an open-source processor architecture that has been gaining traction in recent years.

“This collaboration is just a beginning,” said LG Chief Technology Officer Byoung-hoon Kim. “Tenstorrent’s market leading AI and RISC-V CPU technologies will strengthen SoC competitiveness of LG’s future products while our long-time proven video codec technology will help Tenstorrent take control of data center high-performance processor markets.”

LG, one of the world’s top TV manufacturers, will explore whether the jointly developed chiplets can be incorporated into its displays. It will also evaluate if the chiplets can be used in the auto sector. LG has an automobile division, LG Mobility, that develops vehicle components such as infotainment systems.

As part of the partnership, the electronics giant will receive AI and RISC-V CPU technology from Tenstorrent. The company, in turn, will gain access to LG’s video codec technology. Codecs are used to change the format of multimedia files for the purpose of reducing the amount of storage space and bandwidth they require.

According to Tenstorrent, LG’s technology will help improve the video processing capabilities of its future data center products.

The most advanced data center AI module the company has announced to date is an accelerator card called the Grayskull e300. According to Tenstorrent, it can reach top speeds of 1700 TOPS with the help of certain software optimizations. One TOPs equals a trillion computing operations per second.

The Grayskull e300 card features two of the company’s AI-optimized Grayskull chips. Those chips, in turn, are based on an internally-developed core design that Tenstorrent calls Tensix. Each Tensix core includes five RISC-V CPU modules along with circuits optimized to perform vector and tensor operations, which are calculations that AI models use to process data.

Tenstorrent has also equipped its chips with a technology dubbed conditional compute. According to the company, the technology allows certain AI tasks to be performed by activating only parts of a neural network rather than all its code. The result is a reduction in infrastructure requirements. 

“It is increasingly important for industry leaders to own their silicon future,” said Keller. “LG is a giant in our industry, and this collaboration will strengthen their portfolio of technologies for their future chip solutions, providing greater flexibility to differentiate their products.”

Image: Tenstorrent