Thursday, 23 August 2007

Startup Launches 64-Core Processor

A MIT-inspired startup has launched a new multi-core chip at the annual Hot Chips conference at Stanford University...

A MIT-inspired startup has launched a new multi-core chip at the annual Hot Chips conference at Stanford University. The TILE64 boasts a "clean sheet" design, not based on any legacy and this will, says Tilera, provide a huge leap in multithread multithreaded performance.

Tilera was founded in 2004 by Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher Anant Agarwal to bring to market the multi-core processor.

Agarwal has created what he calls a "mesh" multi-core architecture, where the cores are all interconnected rather than going through a frontside bus.

Tilera holds 40-plus patents for its multi-core design. TIL64 will be the first in a series of processors built. The TILE64 processor contains 64 full-featured, programmable cores that Agarwal claims can perform 500 billion operations per second and delivers ten times the performance and thirty times the performance-per-watt of the Intel dual-core Xeon.