Tilera Unveiled 64-Core Mesh-based Processor

Nowadays we have been talking of Duo Core, Quad Core or even many more cores for the power hungry hyperthreading and multi-processing. However, there is always design and cost constraint in putting more cores into the same die. In order to break the boundary, Tilera Corporation has came out with the proof of concept design, known as TILE64 which integrates 64 cores on a single chip using Mesh network interconnect bus.

The intelligent Mesh interconnect, known as iMesh is said to be able to connect hundreds or even thousands of cores together while allowing parallel processing to perform the necessary tasks. Surprisingly, each core can run on its own dedicated OS such as Linux or Windows while being supported by L1 and L2 caches that further improve latency and overall performance. Besides, there are four DDR2 memory controllers being embedded into the chips to reduce the footprint. That is not all, you will be able find some legacy IO interfaces such as I2C, UART, SPI and even PCIe and GbE ports for interconnect with external chips.
Some may interested to know if the cores that we have been talking here are similar to actual Intel or AMD core that we familiar with. It may not be in apple to apple comparison but the large scale size is expected to improve the processing power significantly in embedded system world. With current core processor’s speed ranged from 600MHz to 900MHz, we should expect to see higher core frequency exceeding 1GHz in the commercial market in near future.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, August 23rd, 2007 at 12:08 am and is filed under Computers & Electronic Gadgets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.