Multicore processor features 64 programmable cores
By Robert Cravotta, Technical Editor -- 8/20/2007
Tilera based its TILE64 processor on a mesh-multicore architecture that can scale to thousands of cores. The TILE64 processor is the first silicon instantiation of the architecture, and it contains 64 programmable cores. Each core is a full-featured, general-purpose processor, including L1 and L2 caches, and each can run its own operating system, such as Linux. The cores connect to each other and the outside world through the iMesh (intelligent-mesh) network, which places a packet-communications switch on each processor core and arranges the cores in a grid fashion to enable low-latency, high-bandwidth communications between the cores, memory, and I/O.
The processor integrates four DDR2-memory controllers, two XAUIs (10-Gbps attachment-unit interfaces), two 10-Gbps PCIe (Peripheral Component Interface Express) interfaces, two 1-Gbps Ethernet RGMIIs (reduced-gigabit-media-independent interfaces), and a programmable Flexible I/O interface to support CompactFlash and disk drives. The TILE64 processor targets infrastructure-video and -telecommunications applications. The TILE64 can support two streams of broadcast-quality, high-definition H.264-encoding capability in a single chip and more than 10 streams of encoding for high-definition videoconferencing applications. The TILE64 enables processing for as much as 20 Gbps of L4-L7 telecommunications services.
The Eclipse-based integrated development environment supports an ANSI standard C compiler, a full-system-simulation model, and a set of flexible command-line interfaces. The multicore-development environment provides graphically driven tools for debugging and profiling multicore processors as well as an application-level library that provides lightweight, socketlike stream-communication mechanisms. To leverage open-source tools and applications, the TILE64 processor supports a standard SMP (symmetric-multiprocessing) Linux programming environment. Three variants of the TILE64 processor are available now with prices starting at $435 (10,000), based on frequency and integrated peripherals. Tilera’s road map also includes plans for 36- and 120-core devices.
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