Lian Weihan of Tenstorrent: Adhere to the strategy of full openness and launch the fastest RISC-V CPU in 2027

"Open source is innovation, and sharing is the driving force of progress." On July 16, 2025, at the main forum of the "5th RISC-V China Summit", Tenstorrent CEO Jim Keller and Tenstorrent Chief Architect Wei-Han Lien said this in a speech entitled "Integrating Computing into Openness, Enabling the Future with Wisdom".

Lian Weihan explained that the theme of this speech has three connotations: first, "integration" represents the deep integration of AI and CPU technology; second, "open" highlights Tenstorrent's adherence to the spirit of open source; and finally, "wisdom for the future" indicates Tenstorrent's vision of going beyond computing power improvement and moving towards the intelligent era. "We firmly believe that the future computing ecosystem will belong to those pioneers who maintain an open mind and dare to integrate innovation."

The golden age of AI chips , Tenstorrent embraces open source

At present, Nvidia's market value has exceeded 4 trillion US dollars, indicating that basic computing power has become a key threshold for the commercialization of AI algorithms. However, the diversified characteristics of AI application scenarios determine that chip architecture must move towards differentiated development.

Lian Weihan emphasized that this marks the arrival of the golden age of AI chip design. Only through collaborative innovation in the industry chain and the development of a chip portfolio with diverse architectures can the diversified needs of future AI be met.

DeepSeek is a good example, it reduced the price of AI by 30 times. Therefore, the price of future chip design is not just the chip, but also includes software, software open source development system, motherboard, and server. These make the chip price very expensive, reaching billions of dollars.

The key to achieving AI democratization lies in building an open and optimized infrastructure. To this end, Tenstorrent fully embraces open source.

As we all know, Tenstorrent is a company co-founded by legendary chip designer Jim Keller, who also serves as CEO. Lian Weihan also emphasized Jim Keller's attitude towards open source: "Our CEO has always maintained a firm belief in RISC-V and open source technology. At Tenstorrent, open source is not only a technical strategy, but also an innovation philosophy - we firmly believe that open sharing is the core driving force for the progress of the industry. All the company's technological achievements are open source, and this attitude of open competition stems from our confidence in our technological innovation capabilities."

Open Chip Architecture (OCA) , released at the end of the year

"We estimate that by 2028, 60% to 80% of high-performance AI chips will adopt chiplet architecture." Lian Weihan emphasized the RISC-V-based CPU design, open AI accelerator architecture, open source software stack, and the ongoing chiplet technology open source plan. Faced with the R&D cost of $1 billion to $2 billion for a single chip, only open collaboration can lower the threshold for innovation.

After two and a half years of research and development, Tenstorrent is about to release a revolutionary open chip architecture (OCA) at the end of this year. Compared with traditional solutions, OCA has three major breakthroughs: first, full stack open source, complete open source implementation from the physical layer to the software layer; second, systematic design, including a complete abstract system of the physical layer, transport layer, protocol layer, system layer, and software layer; third, ecological interoperability, ensuring plug-and-play of chips from different manufacturers.

OCA will bring significant value to the industry: first, it will reduce R&D costs by more than 40%; second, it will support manufacturers to focus on core value design; and third, it will achieve seamless collaboration of chipsets across manufacturers.

Taking automotive electronics as an example, OCA can flexibly support the computing power requirements of autonomous driving systems at all levels from L1 to L4 while maintaining a diversified supply chain.

Tenstorrent 's product plans

Tenstorrent is committed to creating the world's top CPU products, which stems from Tenstorrent's deep understanding of open source systems - excellent hardware practices must be accompanied by an equally excellent software development system. The success of the Linux system has proven this, and its excellent cost-effectiveness demonstrated by its perfect combination with the Pentium processor is the best example.

Lian Weihan said that Tenstorrent meets different market demands through diversified designs such as the Athena 8 core particles, and has formulated a clear product roadmap in the field of open hardware architecture.

According to the plan, the Ascalon series processors will maintain an annual performance improvement of about 10% in the next two to three years, and it is hoped that they will become the world's leading CPU product by 2027.

The Callandor processor, which is expected to be released in 2027, is expected to become the world's fastest processor and will also have excellent compilation capabilities and operating efficiency.

At the end of the introduction, Lian Weihan emphasized that Tenstorrent has always adhered to a comprehensive open strategy, adopting an open model from software development systems to hardware IP. Tenstorrent firmly believes that open collaboration can effectively reduce design costs, give rise to more innovative architectures, and ultimately bring better quality and more affordable AI products to the market.