Tilera Unveils The First 100-Core Processor

The San Jose, Calif.-based private company also unveiled 16-, 36- and 64-core processors as part of the new Tile-Gx series.

"[The processors] raise the bar for performance-per-watt to new levels with 10 times better compute efficiency compared to Intel's next-generation Westmere processor," the company said in a statement.

All four chips use the company's two-dimensional iMesh interconnect that eliminates the need for an on-chip bus. In addition, iMesh's Dynamic Distributed Cache (DDC) system lets each core's local cache to be shared across the entire chip.

These two technologies enable the Tile architecture performance to scale linearly with the number of cores on the chip -- something that has never been achieved before, according to the company.

"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," said CEO Omid Tahernia, in a statement.

The Tile-Gx series operates at up to 1.5GHz with power consumption ranging from 10 to 55 watts. And, as is the case with Tilera's other lines of processors, the Tile and TilePro, the new Tile-Gx series incorporates many cores on a single chip together with integrated memory controllers and a rich set of I/O.

The Tile-Gx has several other features, such as new three-issue 64-bit core with full virtual memory system. Each core includes 32 KB L1 I-cache, 32 KB L1 D-cache and 256 KB L2 cache with up to 26 MB total L3 coherent cache across the device. There's also improved signal processing performance with a 4 MAC/cycle multiplier unit that delivers up to 600 billion MACs per second, more than 12 times the fastest commercial DSP.

Tilera said that the Tile-Gx36 processor will be sampling in the fourth quarter of 2010 with the other processors rolling out in the following two quarters.