Chip comparison
SambaNova SN40L vs Tenstorrent Blackhole
Side-by-side specs
Straight from each vendor's datasheet. Winner in bold: higher throughput, memory, or transistor count; lower power draw or price. Sparse (2:4) throughput roughly doubles the FP8/INT8 numbers shown.
| Field | SambaNova SN40L | Tenstorrent Blackhole |
|---|---|---|
| Process node | TSMC N5 | TSMC N6 |
| TDP | 700 W | 300 W |
| Memory | 1500 GB DDR5 (three-tier: 64 MB SRAM + 64 GB HBM3 + 1.5 TB DDR5) | 32 GB GDDR6 |
| Memory bandwidth | — | 512 GB/s |
| FP16 (dense) | 638 TFLOPS | 745 TFLOPS |
| FP8 (dense) | 1,250 TFLOPS | — |
| INT8 (dense) | — | 2,980 TOPS |
| Form factor | PCIe (SN40L DataScale system) | PCIe |
| Announced | 2023-09-19 | 2024-07-01 |
| Released | 2024-01-01 | 2025-01-01 |
Robots running SambaNova SN40L
No robots publicly running it yet.
Robots running Tenstorrent Blackhole
No robots publicly running it yet.
Data centers with SambaNova SN40L
No data centers publicly running it yet.
Data centers with Tenstorrent Blackhole
No data centers publicly running it yet.
Common questions
SambaNova SN40L vs Tenstorrent Blackhole: which is faster for training?
SambaNova SN40L has 1.68x the dense FP16/BF16 throughput of the other (SambaNova SN40L: 1,250 TFLOPS; Tenstorrent Blackhole: 745 TFLOPS). Real-world training speed also depends on memory bandwidth, interconnect, and software stack: see the spec diff for those inputs.
SambaNova SN40L vs Tenstorrent Blackhole: which has more memory?
SambaNova SN40L carries more HBM (SambaNova SN40L: 1500 GB DDR5 (three-tier: 64 MB SRAM + 64 GB HBM3 + 1.5 TB DDR5); Tenstorrent Blackhole: 32 GB GDDR6). Memory capacity sets the largest model that fits on one chip without partitioning; memory bandwidth sets inference throughput.
SambaNova SN40L vs Tenstorrent Blackhole: which is more power-efficient?
Dense FP16/BF16 TFLOPS per watt: SambaNova SN40L 1.79 (1,250 ÷ 700 W); Tenstorrent Blackhole 2.48 (745 ÷ 300 W). Tenstorrent Blackhole wins at the die level; system-level efficiency also depends on cooling and interconnect.
See also: every chip comparison · SambaNova SN40L full page · Tenstorrent Blackhole full page.