Tilera Competes With Intel With A 64-core Processor

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Intel has been getting competition not only from other giants of the industry such as AMD but from some startups like Tilera as well. Tilera has announced a new processor named Tile64 that boasts a 64-core architecture that according to the company packs a punch, ten time that of Intel’s dual-core Xeon processor.

Tilera has stated that their new invention overpowers Intel’s dual core offering by a factor of 10 on performance and a factor of 30 on power efficiency. Based on a 90 nm RISC technology, the new offering from Tilera is clocked between 600 MHz and 1 GHz and is aimed for integration in embedded applications such as routers, switches, appliances, video conferencing systems and set-top boxes. The company also hopes that their unique architecture has solved all problem linked to the manufacture of multi-core processors and their architecture can be used to develop processors with hundreds or even thousands of cores.

Intel is losing on its centralized bus architecture front, which should soon be running into a bottleneck. Here the startup has done well as its cores can exchange data will all other cores through a mesh architecture. The chip has been divided into 64 tiles each of which consists of a CPU unit, a cache unit and a switch. This switch can send information in four directions to its neighboring tiles. Each tile boasts of a 500 Gb/s bandwidth and its aggregate bandwidth tops out at 32 Tb/s.

Tilera has done well in not only solving the data traffic puzzle in a multi-core processor architecture, but the company has come up with an interesting cache architecture for the tiles that enables each tile to work as an independent system that can run on an operating system. Each of the 64 tiles comes with two 8 KB L1 caches as well as a 64 KB L2 cache. There is no L3 cache in the system, however, if required a software developer can utilize both the L1 and L2 cache as a single 5 MB L3 cache.

The result of this amazing technique is a processor in which each tile consumes a maximum of 300 mWatt that means a maximum chip consumption of around 19 watts. This chip packs enough punch to encore eight parallel standard definition video streams at 2 Mb/s, two HD 720p streams at 7 Mb/s each and one 1080p HD stream at 20 Mb/s.

The company has stated that their processor is available now and 10k-tray pricing is set at $435 for each Tile64 chip that seems to be cheap considering that it can replace 10 Xeon processors. The company has done all greatness in the chip however its competition with Intel is still going Intel’s way. Every time a new processor company comes it has to compete with generation old big guns such as Intel, AMD and Texas Instruments. Customers need a long record and a lengthy future road map in a company before they make any purchases. No doubt Tilera has released a great chip, but it has nothing in past or future that can woo some Intel fans towards it. Let’s wait and check out how things turn out to be. Stay tuned!