Tenstorrent Tensix Harvesting Tool

This tool is intended to support editing the count of disabled Tensix columns within a firmware bundle for Tenstorrent Blackhole cards. The primary use case for this tool is enabling Tensix cores that have been "soft harvested" on p150 cards. p150 cards (purchased prior to Jan 2026) contain 20 additional Tensix cores, which can be reenabled with this tool. Note that metal and other Tenstorrent software will not optimize for these cores moving forward.

The Tensix column count is set by specification tables in the firmware bundle, which this tool is capable of editing. A modified firmware bundle can then be flashed to the Blackhole card in order to enable additional Tensix columns.

Requirements

This tool requires protoc be installed and available on your path. On Ubuntu, this can be installed with the command sudo apt install protobuf-compiler

Usage

In order to modify the Tensix disable count for all Blackhole p150 cards, run the following. Please use tt-flash >= 3.6.0 to avoid known issues with overwriting board configuration data:

pip install tt-update-tensix-disable-count
tt-update-tensix-disable-count \
	--input <input_fwbundle> \
	--output <output_fwbundle>  \
	--board P150A-1 --board P150B-1 --board P150C-1 \
	--disable-count 0
pip install tt-flash>=3.6.0
tt-flash <output_fwbundle>
# Verify number of Tensix cores available
python3 -c "import pyluwen; print(pyluwen.detect_chips()[0].get_telemetry().tensix_enabled_col.bit_count() * 10)"

Support

While Tenstorrent will continue to support this tool, Metal and other Tenstorrent software will not optimize for the additional 20 Tensix cores on early p150 cards going forwards.