Jim Keller’s Tenstorrent has quietly downgraded its Blackhole P150a accelerators
This does not happen often in the hardware space, especially for products that have already shipped. Apparently, Tenstorrent, the AI company behind Blackhole PCIe AI accelerators, is announcing a downgrade for existing and newly shipped cards. The company was established a few years ago, and it is now led by Jim Keller, the SoC architect known for various projects at AMD, Intel, Apple and Tesla.
Tenstorrent has downgraded the published specs for its Blackhole PCIe p150 cards. The core count is now listed at 120 Tensix cores, down from the 140-core configuration shown in late-2025 materials.
Old (Left) & New (Right) specifications of Blackhole series, Source: Tenstorrent
Back in December, Tenstorrent’s own comparison table listed p150a and p150b at 140 Tensix cores, 210 MB of SRAM, and higher throughput figures. That same 140-core spec also showed up in third-party coverage, including The Register, which quoted 140 cores and higher FP8/BLOCKFP8 numbers for p150.
Today, Tenstorrent’s Blackhole store page and spec table show p150a and p150b at 120 Tensix cores, 180 MB SRAM, and 664 TFLOPS (BLOCKFP8).
Tenstorrent’s documentation is also inconsistent right now: the “processor overview” section still says 140 cores, while the add-in board table lists 120 cores for p150.
Tenstorrent is not a Serious company bruh pic.twitter.com/Hyls2T23Sx
Bionic_Squash (@SquashBionic) February 4, 2026
Tenstorrent does give an official reason, and it is tied to firmware. In the TT Zephyr Platforms v19.5.0 release notes, Tenstorrent says p150 cards shipping from January 2026 move to 120 cores “to present a unified interface” for Metal and other system software, and firmware v19.5.0+ will also change existing p150 cards to 120 cores. Tenstorrent also claims typical workloads see about a 12% performance difference.
, Source: Tenstorrent
Spec downgrades after launch are rare. Outside Tenstorrent’s stated “unified interface” goal, there could be a different unnamed reason for a downgrade.
Source: Tenstorrent , Tenstorrent
