Tenstorrent · Blackhole · Layer 2
Tenstorrent Blackhole
The only credible open-stack option. You can buy a card, and the entire software stack is open source, which no other vendor here offers.
buy You can purchase this outright.
Specifications
- Memory
- GDDR6 rather than HBM
- Bandwidth
- Below HBM parts by design
- Compute
- RISC-V based Tensix cores
- Power
- Lower than HBM accelerators
- Interconnect
- Ethernet-native
- Software
- TT-Metalium, TT-Buda — fully open
- Form factor
- accelerator
- Workload
- both
Verified 2026-09-06. Fields reading “not published” are exactly that — we do not estimate a figure a vendor withholds.
The catch
GDDR6 instead of HBM caps bandwidth well below the frontier parts. This is a developer and sovereignty choice, not a frontier-training choice.
The economics
The sovereignty play at this layer. If open stack and purchasability matter more than peak throughput, nothing else on this list qualifies.
Cost per million tokens is the metric that decides most real purchases, and there is no neutral benchmark for it — every published figure comes from a company selling one side of the comparison. Read all of them, ours included, as claims rather than measurements.
The power question underneath this
A rack of frontier accelerators draws 120–200 kW against a 2026 average of about 27 kW, and the US grid interconnection queue exceeds 2,600 GW with waits approaching five years. Whether you can energise this part is now a harder question than whether you can buy it.
Layer 1 — Energy · The interconnection queue · Rack power density · Tokens per watt
Compared against
- Tenstorrent Blackhole vs NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell — The only fully open stack against the one everything is written for.Compare with NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell
Related silicon
- Intel Gaudi 3 — 128 GB HBM2E, buy
- NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell — 96 GB GDDR7, buy
- AMD Instinct MI300X — 192 GB HBM3, rent
- AMD Instinct MI350X — 288 GB HBM3E, rent
- AMD Instinct MI355X — 288 GB HBM3E, rent
- AWS Trainium 2 — Not published in directly comparable terms, cloud only