Slashdot Mirror
MIT Startup Unveils New 64-Core CPU
single-threaded writes "Tilera, a startup out of MIT, has announced that it is shipping a 64-core CPU. Called the TILE64, the CPU is fabbed on a 90nm process and is clocked at anywhere from 600MHz to 900MHz. '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. That's the critical piece of TILE64's launch story that's missing right now, and it's what I'll keep an eye out for as I watch this product make its way in the market. Though there are any number of questions about this product that remain to be answered, one thing is for certain: TILE64 has indeed brought us into the era of 64 general-purpose, mesh-networked processor cores on a single chip, and that's a major milestone.'"
FTA: It's a "MIPS-like ISA with a few important and peculiar features"
I'll be interested to see what they're going to do about making it easier to program. Wire delay's going to be exposed as hops on the on-chip network. IMHO, the toolchain side's far more interesting to me than shoving a bunch of cores together on an on-die network....
Assuming they did anything interesting on the toolchain side.
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Without those bits of information, it's impossible to guage exactly who might night this chip, and how successful it might be.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Is not if it will run Linux (it will), but if it will run windows? CE does not count.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I can't believe startups haven't figured out that incompatible chips aren't what the market wants. They're either going to sell directly to "supercomputer" makers or just crash and burn.
They'll probably market running Java as a strong point.
(Then again, does it run Linux?)
it reminds me of another T company -- Transmeta. I wonder if they'll hire RMS to work on HURD....
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Just as your system has only a few processes that want to be scheduled simultaneously (and so your observation that "not all of those processes are in [a] runnable state" is correct), those Java Swing applications you are talking about very rarely have more than a thread or two wanting to do work at the same time. The web server is a better example of concurrent execution but those are most often I/O limited as much as CPU limited, and in the vast majority of cases the bottleneck is not the number of threads that can execute concurrently.
It's very hard to take advantage of multiple cores because very often, there isn't more than one thing for a program to be doing at the same time, and for most desktop users, there are rarely more than 1 or 2 programs running actively at a time. Many code paths are not explicitly parallelizable, and many more are parallelizable but not easily so. Just as clock speed is not the holy grail of processor performance, core count isn't either.
I an not sure really what the point is, I guess I am just venting out of frustration. Also adding some information to anyone interested similar work I had done, showing this isn't a new idea.
I put $100,000 Cash and almost 2 years worth of work into this and got nothing, no one was even interested.
I'm not sure why the frustration. I'm sure multi-core was not just your original idea. If you're in the industry you know that:
1. IT is rich on ideas, poor on implementation.
2. Marketing a product is just as (if not more) important than making a product.
3. Most businesses fail in the first 5 years. And this one may be no exception. They didn't exactly enjoy massive success just yet. They got few crappy articles and landed Slashdot. Kind of hard for a hardware company to cash in on that alone.
There design really looks like it was lifted straight off my paper. So I guess at least I am exposing some plagiarisms.
You don't expose plagiarism by venting frustration on Slashdot: where are your patents. How's there guarantee you're the originator, and how's there guarantee they *stole* your work versus reinvent it independently, which happens often with technology that's in a boom (i.e. multi-core designs). There's a reason the patent system exists, forget the grab you read here about patents on Slashdot.
It's good to see that MIT has perfected the technology.
- Build a machine with lots of processors.
- Get investors to buy into the hair-brained scheme.
- ??? (Mention that programming is a problem to be solved shortly.)
- Skip town with the cash (Profit!).
Hmmm. I think I'm missing something about a beowulf cluster, or maybe underpants.It's scary how little history people know. Programming for multi-processor machines was part of the ACM recommended university curriculum back in 1968. Dozens of companies were going to revolutionize the world with parallel (anyone remember the Atari ATW? http://www.atarimuseum.com/computers/16bits/trans