New processor 10x as effective as Sandy Bridge
Many core processor from Tilera takes up the fight against Intel…
Jun 28, 2011 in Chips, Efficiency, Microprocessors
With 36 cores and a power consumption of just 20W the new TILE-Gx 3000 processor from Tilera Corp. could be a potential threat to Intel’s (NASDAQ:INTC) traditional processors.
Each of the 36 cores run at speeds of up to 1 GHz and support 64 bit computing and hardware assisted virtualization.
The TILE-Gx 3000 series was developed using the 40 nanometer TSMC fabrication process. Each core features a three-issue, 64-bit ALU with an advanced virtual memory system. Each core includes 32 kilobytes (kB) of L1 I-cache, 32 kB of L1 D-cache and 256 kB L2 cache, with up to 32 megabytes L3 coherent cache across the device. Processor utilization is optimized using advanced memory stripping that utilizes up to 4 integrated 72-bit DDR3 memory controllers that support up to one terabyte (TB) total capacity. The TILE-Gx 3000 series integrates smart NIC hardware for preprocessing, load balancing, and buffer management of incoming traffic.
The processor with 36 cores will start sampling this summer, but already next year we can look forward to processors in the same series with 64 and 100 cores.
The processors all support Linux 2.6.36 as well as CentOS with complete tool chain support of including Gcc, G++ , Gdb, Gprof, OProfile, perf event, Mudflap, Eclipse. On the language side there is support of ANSI C/C++, Java, PHP, Perl and Python. The real test will be uptake in the market.S|A
This past week Facebook engineers authored a paper, that **appears** to say that TileGX-64 was able to deliver double the throughput, at one-third the energy as compared to Nehalem. No verification from third-party or from Intel itself. But so far no rebuttals.
Note no software porting required. Because the work-load is all Web-serving, with PHP scripts and fast key-value lookups using memcached.
There goes the whole debate about x86-ISA.
The new ISA is PHP scripts ?
Does this open up the field to even PHP FPGAs ;-)
Missing some kind of source of that news.
Company website? Press release?
Own investigation in trashcan of company?
Looks like plagiarism to me.
WOW that is impressive. I haven’t heard about any design from this company yet, if this would be one of their first products that is pretty good! Surely if this thing can be x86(also with Windows) compatible, something with 10 x the processing power of SB at just 20W power usage, is amazing. Note also that this is at 40nm and its power usage can be further reduced at 32 or 28nm. Intel has some serious competition.
Does someone know if this chip would work with windows, and other software?
Add a driver, and you have a GPU.
I have a feeling it’s a little more complex than that…..
also,
a 36 shader Graphics chip is laughable at best.
A week old copy-paste of the Press Release? Even has the same misspelling in it.
This won’t replace desktop CPUs in it’s current form, but it’s a million times better than Larrabee. It could be a good base for a heterogenous multicore CPU.
“million times better then Larrabee”?
It means that this is 100000 times better then GTX580… Wow!!! I want it right now!!
Wait a second… but it has only one fpu per chip… Ah, who cares if it is million times better!
How is this a threat to anything? It doesn’t support x86 or ARM, so it can’t compete with either platform. So desktops and mobile systems are out. Which leaves HPCs and servers. Severs will opt out, since they want to use off-the-shelf software, thus leaving HPC applications. And while they are always willing to do what it takes to get maximum performance, that’s not exactly a market that matters much these days.
The performance-per-watt looks impressive, theoretically. But so did Larrabee, and we saw what happened with that.
The Servers are used by those huge internet social networks, dont care if it is x86 or mips. They need something that understands and does PHP. as in full LAMP stack.
Yes, that’s right ciscoder. For the big datacenters like Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. it’s all about the power efficiency. Sure, these aren’t binary-compatible with x86. But the compute-per-watt gain is a huge motivator to switch when you can save millions of $$ per year in energy and cooling costs.
No, these chips aren’t headed to the desktop and the consumer market. But we at Tilera see a very large opportunity in the Cloud datacenters as well as networking and multimedia infrastructure.
HPC is out of the question for the time being, since Tilera has only one FPU per chip (and 36 integer cores). Cloud, specifically anything that does LAMP stacks, but also ***Java*** — they did mention Java and Eclipse specifically.
ecery one forgets one computer law. is a part of the code is single treadeth than you can through as much cores at is as you want it will not speed op. so maybe we need somthign more like a dual super high IPC and clocked cores and than some small highly threaded cores.
And maybe we just need a high IPC quad core + cloud for highly threaded computing. The cloud chip may be something like this.
Thou has forgotten that this is not for the consumers. It hat been made for yon servers who far prefer multiple cores for managing several remote access events at once rather than running thy little games!
would you not say that Sandy Bridge is primarily used on Windows and MacOS? If this doesn’t work in either of those, how will it threaten Sandy Bridge?
I guess you could mean that in sheer terms of performance on a linux machine, but you didn’t say that.
36 cores sounds great, but if it’s unusable I don’t really want it…that would make it a paperweight for me. Perhaps some industry folks will be excited :-P.
These processors are not being designed for consumer products. They will be used in servers and supercomputers, where they can be very competitive against Sandybridge server chips.
NOTHING threatens Sandy Bridge IPC. You can produce 1000-core atom chips or something like that, but it is pointless.
Agreed.
… If you limit your space-time to x-86 ISA …
Resistance is futile, don’t you know.
a better title for this article would be “New processor 10x as effective as Sandy Bridge; except in X-86 ISA, where Intel does most of their volume”
If you think the “cloud” and “message passing” Hacker News threads are hilarioius now, just wait till people start getting their hands on iMesh processors. Nothing like colossally non-uniform caches to spoil a programmers brightest hopes! You’ll laugh so hard reading about it you’ll want to die!