Tilera seeks processor performance crown with 64-cores

By Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Monday, 20 August 2007 16:49

Opinion and Analysis

Not content with dual or quad core technology, Tilera’s newly available TILE64 Processor, equipped with 64-cores and a mesh-like interconnect that eliminates bottlenecks, seeks to usurp the processor performance crown.

Although Intel demonstrated an 80-core prototype processor in September 2006, and Sun Microsystems demonstrated an eight-core processor only last month, the multicore revolution has only just started, despite dual and quad core processors now being standard computing equipment for most people.

But today’s quad core processors are claimed to have a performance bottleneck that will be met when more cores are added using current technology, and so the quest to deliver ever high performance and ever more cores today continues unabated.

Now comes a company formed in 2004 with well known multi-core chip pioneer Dr. Anant Agarwal as the CTO, working on new multi-core processor technology to leapfrog today’s latest quad-core systems.

The company is the MIT spin-out “Tilera Corporation”, and they’re set to unveil their 64-core ‘TILE64 Processor’ at Stanford University’s ‘Hot Chips’ symposium on the latest microprocessor technologies on Monday 20th of August,  backed by more than 40 patents on multi-core processing technology.

Intel, AMD and IBM, among others, will also be presenting papers at the symposium, but none are expected to have the impact of Tilera’s 64-core processor bombshell, part of which is that the processor is shipping now with a claimed offering of “10x the performance and 30x time performance-per-watt of the Intel dual-core Xeon, and 40x the performance of the leading Texas Instruments DSP”.

Tilera says that each core can run its own operating system, such as Linux, and will first be used in the “advanced networking and digital multimedia space” by at least a dozen customers including 3Com, Codian and GoBackTV.

Tilera President and C.E.O., Devesh Garg said that: "This is the first significant new chip architectural development in a decade. We developed this new architecture because existing multi-core technologies simply cannot scale beyond a handful of cores. Moreover, customers have repeatedly indicated that the current multi-core software tools are very primitive because they are based on single-processor-core models. We're introducing a revolutionary hardware and software platform that has solved the fundamental challenges associated with multi-core scalability."

But what, besides mutliple cores, is crucial when designing a multi-core chip with more than four cores? Find out in the conclusion on the next page...