Tilera 100 Core Processor Targets Web Servers and Cloud Computing

Tilera Corp. announced the new TILE-Gx 8482 family of multicore CPUs, including a 100-core chip. The TILE-Gx100 is claimed to have the highest performance of any microprocessor by a factor of four. Tileras Tile-Gx chips, which run can Linux and other Web server applications, are aimed at the server and cloud computing market.

"Customers will be able to replace an entire board presently using a dozen or more chips with just one of our TILE-Gx processors, greatly simplifying the system architecture and resulting in reduced cost, power consumption, and PC board area. This is truly a remarkable technology achievement." said Tilera CEO Omid Tahernia.

Intel is expected to release its Nehalem-EX chip with eight cores soon, and AMD will follow not long after with a 12-core Opteron chip, but the Tilera chips go far beyond these. The TILE-Gx series is offered with 16, 36, 64 and 100 cores. The performance to watt ratio of the Tilera chips give them an advantage, but applications are limited as yet, since their non-x86 architecture makes software development more costly. Hence Tileras is focus on the server market. The company has ported common Linux applications used in servers, such as Apache, MySQL and Memcached, to the Tilera architecture.

The new series of chips run at up to 1.5GHz, have power consumption ranging from 10 to 55 watts, support for 64-bit processing and will be made using 40nm manufacturing. The series also features integrated DDR3 memory controllers running up to 2133 MHz speeds with ECC support, on-chip MiCA 8482; (Multistream iMesh Crypto Accelerator) system delivers up to 40Gbps encryption and 20Gbps full duplex compression processing, for low latency and wire-speed small packet throughput, and packet processing accelerator system providing wire-speed packet classification, load balancing and buffer management delivering 80 Gbps and 120 million packets-per-second of throughput for packets with multiple layers of encapsulation. Tile-Gx chips will begin shipping next year; the 100-core chip is scheduled to ship in early 2011. Volume pricing for the chips is to be from US$400 to $1,000.