Wednesday, February 4th 2026 Tenstorrent Cuts 20 Cores From Already-Shipping Blackhole P150 Cards by AleksandarK Today, 14:26 Discuss (0 ) Tenstorrent, a startup focused on designing high-performance AI accelerators and led by the renowned computer architect Jim Keller as CEO, has announced significant hardware updates to its existing Blackhole P150 accelerators, which include the P150a and P150b models. In the latest documentation change, the company notes that its Blackhole P150 accelerators will now work with about 14.3% fewer cores than originally advertised. In the official documents, the P150 accelerators are now shipping with 120 working Tensix cores instead of the previously advertised 140 cores. The reason for this change is unknown, as the company provided a vague explanation: To present a unified interface to metal and other system software, firmware v19.5.0 and later will change the core count on all existing cards to 120. Typical workloads show a non-material (~1-2%) performance difference. The Blackhole P150 accelerators featured 140 Tensix cores and 32 GB of GDDR6 memory, operating at up to 300 W in an actively cooled form factor designed for desktop workstations, and the P150a model includes four passive QSFP-DD 800G ports. However, as the number of cores is reduced by approximately 14%, TeraFLOPS take a nosedive as well. In the older documents for the 140-core SKUs, the BLOCKFP8 8-bit floating point performance was listed at 774 TeraFLOPS, while the new 120-core version reduces that number to 664 TeraFLOPS at the same precision level. Why this sudden change is happening is still a mystery. However, the HPC community with a lot of knowledge in the industry suggests a few reasons. The first one is that the Blackhole P150 accelerators are heavily limited by their thermal capacity, which stands at 300 W only. This means that a 140-core version might not be reaching its full potential easily, limiting the card's performance target. A second and also plausible reason is that the accelerator is aiming to increase its silicon yield, where it is much easier to get a chip with 120 working cores instead of all 140. As the company is preparing to scale its accelerator design to multi-chip systems, getting the silicon yield within an acceptable range is the most important factor. Finally, it could also mean that the shipping silicon versions are not entirely ready, and some argue that this represents the equivalent of shipping experimental silicon. Source: FelixCLC Related News Tags: 300 W 800G accelerator AI CEO Core Cuts Jim Keller Tenstorrent Sep 18th 2025 NVIDIA Buys $5B Worth of Intel, RTX iGPUs Coming to x86, Shares up 25% (256) Jul 25th 2025 Intel CEO Confirms SMT To Return to Future CPUs (95) Oct 22nd 2025 Intel Nova Lake Could Arrive Without AVX10, APX, and AMX Support (61) Dec 17th 2025 With New Mozilla CEO, Firefox Will Become a Modern AI Browser (80) Dec 19th 2025 Firefox Dev Clarifies New AI Feature Killswitch: I Hope We Can (Re)gain Your Trust Here (58) Oct 24th 2025 AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700 GPU Arrives October 27 at $1,299 for Retail (56) Jan 22nd 2026 Intel Unveils Glass Core Substrate with EMIB Multi-Chip Connection (2) Dec 13th 2025 Intel to Acquire SambaNova AI Chip Startup (21) Jan 26th 2026 Microsoft Introduces Its Newest AI Accelerator: Maia 200 (12) Feb 3rd 2026 Firefox 148 Gets AI Killswitch After a Massive Community Backlash (29) Add your own on Tenstorrent Cuts 20 Cores From Already-Shipping Blackhole P150 Cards There are no yet.
