Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Another multi-core...

Tilera has come out of the closet. There is a good writeup about its 64 core processor here

Here is a snippet from the article:
"what will make or break Tilera is not how many peak theoretical operations per second it's capable of (Tilera claims 192 billion 32-bit ops/sec), nor how energy-efficient its mesh network is, but how easy it is for programmers to extract performance from the device."

I agree. And by focusing on the development environment, ability to run SMP Linux etc, Tilera has chosen to offer a smooth learning curve to software engineers. Although there are some design wins, it remains to be seen whether taking the first few steps on this curve offer a significant advantage over the wares sold by Tilera's competitors: Intel, AMD, Cavium, RMI and Sun.

There is another good article here. An interesting point about pricing:
"For a new entry into the market, Tilera priced its product with confidence: 10K-tray pricing is set at $435 for each Tile64 – which appears cheap, if it can replace ten Xeon processors. But in a real world environment, the processor is priced against a quad-core Xeon 5345 (2.33 GHz, 8 MB L2 cache), which currently sells for a 1K tray price of $455. "



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