Tilera targets Intel, AMD with 100-core processor

[Sabre]

Article

The chips will start shipping next year, with the 100-core chip scheduled to ship in early 2011. Volume pricing for the chips will range from US$400 to $1,000.

It will be interesting to see where this goes. I'm curious about the instruction set. It looks like they have their own compilers to take x86 code and compile it on their processor (It can run MySQL, Apache and such). If it is indeed x86 equivalent... there might be some interesting things that you could do with it!

[ElZorro]

And Julian builds a render farm for his cg pr0n....

[Sabre]

lol, why do you think I had a server room in my house! I'd probably do it on Tesla/CUDA though

[Sabre]

Reg update

Ahead of the Structure 2011 conference in San Francisco tomorrow, Tilera is lifting the veil a bit more on its Tile-Gx 3000 series of server chips, which will sport 36, 64, or 100 cores in a single socket. The Gx 3000 series of chips are the second prong in a three-prong attach that Tilera is making on the IT market.

The company already launched its Tile-Gx 8000 series in early May, which are aimed at network equipment makers and which have encryption and zippy I/O capabilities that are not required for server workloads.

The company will eventually offer a Tile-Gx 5000 processors, with hefty compute capabilities aimed at video encoding and streaming workloads.

With the first-generation of Tile64 and second-generation TilePro processors from Tilera, the company had one chip design regardless of the intended workload.
...
Each core on the chip has three instruction threads and has 32KB of L1 data cache and 32KB of L1 instruction cache, and also has a 256KB L2 cache; the mesh network is used to link those L1 and L2 caches into a single, coherent L3 cache shared by all the cores on the chip. (So the top-end, 100-core variant of the Tile-Gx chip has 32MB of total cache.)

The Tile-Gx chips have 64-bit processing on their cores, and include floating point math instructions that allow a floating point operating to be done in five cycles instead of hundreds of cycles when done in software.

This is, believe it or not, important for PHP support, Ihab Bishara, director of cloud computing applications at Tilera, tells El Reg.

The Tile-Gx chips might support 64-bit processing, but physical memory addressing on the chips is either 39-bit or 40-bit, which works out to either 512GB or 1TB of maximum main memory. Each core burns less than a half watt of power.

[Sabre]

Xbit

Tilera Corp., a developer of programmable many-core microprocessors, has announced several significant steps for the company including the immediate general availability of two of its low-power 64-bit processors – Tile-Gx36 and Tile-Gx16 – as well as companion evaluation systems.

Many-core chips by Tilera features devices with 16 to 100 identical processor cores (tiles) interconnected with Tilera's iMesh on-chip network. Each tile consists of a complete, full-featured processor as well as L1 and L2 cache and a non-blocking switch that connects the tiles into the mesh. Each tile can independently run a full operating system, or multiple tiles taken together can run a multiprocessing OS like SMP Linux. TileDirect technology provides coherent I/O directly into the tile caches to deliver ultimate low-latency packet processing performance. Tilera's DDC (Dynamic Distributed Cache) system for fully coherent cache across the tile array enables scalable performance for threaded and shared memory applications.

The Tile-Gx processors are programmed in ANSI standard C and C++. Tiles can be grouped in clusters to apply the appropriate amount of horsepower to each application. Since multiple, virtualized operating system instances can be run on the Tile-Gx simultaneously, it can replace multiple CPU and DSP subsystems for both the data plane and control plane.

Tile-Gx36 and Tile-Gx16 64-bit processors, fabricated in 40 nm, are now generally available to customers. The devices contain 36 and 16 full featured cores, respectively, providing never-before-seen performance and performance-per-watt, according to Tilera:

The Tile-Gx36 (1.40GHz) has demonstrated an industry-best CoreMark score of over 165 000 (over 60% higher compared to Intel Core i7-2600K), while consuming a fraction of the power of the nearest competitor.
In networking, a single Tile-Gx36 can deliver more than 40 gigabits per-second of L2/L3 packet forwarding performance across small and large packet sizes using less than 25W of power.In cloud, a single Tile-Gx36-based server can provide better performance than a Xeon-based system at one-fifth the power and one-eighth the space.
These performance numbers enable customers to add more services into their networking infrastructure equipment, support more video capabilities in their media applications, and reduce overall cost and power consumption in datacenters, Tilera claims.

I might just have to play with one of these....

[thermatico]

And Julian builds a render farm for his cg pr0n....

Tentacles for everyone!

[Sabre]