As the name suggests, Tilera's chip includes 64 cores. A 36-core and a 120-core chip is also planned.

Startup Tilera announced Monday that the company has begun shipping what you might call a "mega-multicore" chip, the TILE64, one that can scale to hundreds or thousands of cores.

Unfortunately, you won't be using it, however, unless you're involved in the design of network switches or CGI render farms.

Tilera, like the name suggests, is a "tiled" architecture, one that connects each processor through an I/O network. What's interesting is that the design of the chip is pretty conventional; each core has a level 1 and level 2 cache for storing instructions, like a PC processor, and each core connects to the others via shared L3 cache. That's pretty efficient.

And the really interesting thing? Each core can run Linux. But there's no indication that that phrase means that the chip can run anything but a specifically modeled Linux kernel, and not a more mainstream implementation like Ubuntu.

Multicore is clearly the wave of the future; think of Intel's 80-core research chip. And if you're interested, you can spend $435 to buy one of Tilera's new cores. Unfortunately, that price also assumes you're buying 9,999 more in the same purchase; individual chip pricing might be a tad higher.

Similiar at The Inquirer

As the name suggests, Tilera's chip includes 64 cores. A 36-core and a 120-core chip is also planned.

Startup Tilera announced Monday that the company has begun shipping what you might call a "mega-multicore" chip, the TILE64, one that can scale to hundreds or thousands of cores.

Unfortunately, you won't be using it, however, unless you're involved in the design of network switches or CGI render farms.

Tilera, like the name suggests, is a "tiled" architecture, one that connects each processor through an I/O network. What's interesting is that the design of the chip is pretty conventional; each core has a level 1 and level 2 cache for storing instructions, like a PC processor, and each core connects to the others via shared L3 cache. That's pretty efficient.

And the really interesting thing? Each core can run Linux. But there's no indication that that phrase means that the chip can run anything but a specifically modeled Linux kernel, and not a more mainstream implementation like Ubuntu.

Multicore is clearly the wave of the future; think of Intel's 80-core research chip. And if you're interested, you can spend $435 to buy one of Tilera's new cores. Unfortunately, that price also assumes you're buying 9,999 more in the same purchase; individual chip pricing might be a tad higher.

Similiar at The Inquirer

i saw that on the inq. i'm sure it'll be useful for lots of apps if it's easy to port to or run's x86? but i would guess the limiting factor for rosetta on it would be each tile's minimal cache...

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