Pages: [1]
Sid2
 
Forum moderator - BOINCstats SOFA member
BAM!ID: 28578
Joined: 2007-06-13
Posts: 7336
Credits: 593,058,630
World-rank: 3,055

2009-10-27 12:32:46





Tilera, which already has 36- and 64-core processors on the market, is announcing its third-generation products, Tile-Gx, which includes plans for a 100-core processor. The chip will appear in 2011. Tilera officials hope the high-core count in its processors will help give the company traction in a space dominated by Intel and AMD, which currently are looking at eight-core processors.

Tilera’s architecture got its start in 2002 as a project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology funded through the federal DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) program and the National Science Foundation, leading to the company’s founding in 2004 to commercialize the architecture. Tilera came out with its first 64-core processor in 2007.

. . . it will be a while before the 100-core processor hits the market. Tilera will start sampling the new 36-core Tile-Gx chip in the fourth quarter, followed by the 16-core soon afterward. The 100-core chip will come in the first quarter of 2011, followed by the 64-core processor later that year.


More . . .

Rakarin
 
BAM!ID: 1019
Joined: 2006-05-30
Posts: 92
Credits: 0
World-rank: 0

2009-10-27 13:04:26

WARNING: I am posting before morning coffee. This post may be rambling gibberish.

Interesting, but I'd like more information. I'll probably check Wikipedia later. I see no information on processor architecture, so I don't know if it's MIPS, PowerPC, ARM, RISC, etc. It doesn't seem to be a traditional x86 architecture. All the applications seem built for signal processing / streaming data. The big platforms are for networking devices, including virus scanning of network packets.

Just taking a guess, I would say these are not robust enough to run a desktop operating system, and I would guess the floating point powers would be weak or null. I could be wrong, though. Also, as an accelerator board, it could help DC projects.

Mike
Rakarin
 
BAM!ID: 1019
Joined: 2006-05-30
Posts: 92
Credits: 0
World-rank: 0

2009-10-27 20:30:01

Hi. I found some info:

http://www.linuxfordevices.com/c/a/News/Tilera-TileGx/

The cores are MIPS based, and are optimized for streaming data. So, it probably would be pretty weak running an OS. (The Cell BBe in the PlayStation 3 has the same issue, though the Cell 8i is supposed to make a robust workstation.) They do apparently have floating point capability, which is good, but I don't know how powerful. The Tile processor cards are already available in 32-bit flavors, including a 6x6 (36 core) model.

It looks like it runs its own compile of Linux, so one probably could not just throw Debian MIPS on it. If they become popular in research as a co-processor card, then it may be worth BOINC'ing on it. Otherwise, unfortunatley, it seems all computation is converging on Intel. ATI and nVidia show some promise. The Cell did, but that seemed to be eclipsed by the nVidia CUDA environment. China's Godson 3 processor *might* be something different, but the 2F seemed to fizzle.

Personally, I think some diversity in the ecosystem would be a good thing. I would consider getting a second PS3 (an older one with the PS2 chipset!) if I could get a robust BOINC client on it. I would also get an XBox 360 if I could cruch or fold on it.
Sid2
 
Forum moderator - BOINCstats SOFA member
BAM!ID: 28578
Joined: 2007-06-13
Posts: 7336
Credits: 593,058,630
World-rank: 3,055

2010-06-28 18:39:39


Tilera to stuff 200 cores onto single chip: Plus memory, controllers, mesh network...



Multicore chip upstart Tilera has announced an ambitious product roadmap for its TileGX systems-on-a-chip that will see the company plunk up to 200 cores – plus their memory and peripheral controllers and a mesh network linking the chips – onto a single die within the next few years. The company is also trotting out a new server partner and investor – PC and server maker Quanta – using its current TilePro64 processors in a 2U server that has 512 cores jam-packed into a 2U rack form factor.

The Quanta system board has four Gigabit Ethernet ports, four 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports with SFP+ connectors and two 10/100 Mbit Ethernet ports for IMPI 2.0 remote management, as cloudy infrastructure users like. (If you have clusters with failover for applications built in, as cloud workloads do, you don't need a full-blown service processor for the server.)

The board also has two 10/100 Mbit Ethernet ports for plugging in management consoles. The Tile64Pro chip would allow as many as sixteen Gigabit Ethernet and eight 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports to be put on the board without adding any auxiliary chips to the mobo. (Half of each of these components is dedicated to each Tile64Pro processor.)



More . . .

Pages: [1]

Index :: Gadgets, Games and Gizmos :: Tilera Talks 100-Core Processor
Reason: