tt-metal

TT-Metal is the open source software stack for Tenstorrent's AI accelerator cards, the company's answer to NVIDIA's CUDA. TT-NN is a Python and C++ library of neural network operations; TT-Metalium is the low-level layer for writing your own kernels on the chip. Apache 2.0 and free.

It does nothing without Tenstorrent hardware. Setup means a kernel driver, firmware and, for Blackhole systems, Ubuntu 22.04. The TT-Installer script handles most of it, or you pass the device into their Docker image. Tenstorrent also runs an evaluation cloud with no public rates.

The software is free; the hardware is the bill. Blackhole p100a cards start at $999, p150 at $1,399, and the QuietBox 2 workstation is $9,999. Solo: one card is the cheapest way into a non-NVIDIA AI stack you can read down to the metal. Small teams: worth it only if owning the kernel layer matters. Larger teams: talk to Tenstorrent about Galaxy servers or their cloud.

The catch: it's pre-1.0 and moves daily. Dev builds ship every night, the README's release table still shows a March release as the latest, and Tenstorrent says Blackhole optimization is still under active development. Expect to read source, not polished docs.