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Exploring Fast Fourier Transforms on the Tenstorrent Wormhole

2025/06/18 by Nick Brown, Brown, Nick, Jake Davies +3
Engineering · #Advanced Fiber Optic Sensors #Distributed #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Parallel #and Cluster Computing (cs.DC)

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2506.15437

openalex publication_date 2025/06/18 · openalex created_date 2025/10/19 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

Whilst numerous areas of computing have adopted the RISC-V Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) wholesale in recent years, it is yet to become widespread in HPC. RISC-V accelerators offer a compelling option where the HPC community can benefit from the specialisation offered by the open nature of the standard but without the extensive ecosystem changes required when adopting RISC-V CPUs. In this paper we explore porting the Cooley-Tukey Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) algorithm to the Tenstorrent Wormhole PCIe RISC-V based accelerator. Built upon Tenstorrent's Tensix architecture, this technology decouples the movement of data from compute, potentially offering increased control to the programmer. Exploring different optimisation techniques to address the bottlenecks inherent in data movement, we demonstrate that for a 2D FFT whilst the Wormhole n300 is slower than a server-grade 24-core Xeon Platinum CPU, the Wormhole draws around 8 times less power and consumes around 2.8 times less energy than the CPU when computing the Fourier transform.

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