tt-metal, also referred to in its documentation as TT-Metalium, is Tenstorrent’s low-level software development kit for programming applications on Tenstorrent AI accelerators. The project is designed for developers who need direct access to the company’s Tensix processor architecture, exposing a programming model that is closer to hardware control than high-level inference frameworks. Instead of following a traditional GPU model centered on massive thread parallelism, the platform is built around a grid of specialized compute nodes called Tensix cores, each with local SRAM, dedicated compute units, and multiple RISC-V control processors. The SDK provides the abstractions and APIs needed to manage data movement, compute kernels, memory coordination, and execution flow across this architecture.
Features
- Low-level SDK for direct programming of Tenstorrent Tensix processors
- C++ API model for hardware control, kernel development, and resource management
- Support for reader, compute, and writer kernel workflows across cores
- Examples ranging from DRAM loopback to multi-core matrix multiplication
- Designed for both ML and non-ML application development
- Foundation layer for performance optimization on Tenstorrent accelerator hardware