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.'"

Comments

Instruction Set

[Lally Singh]

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.

I Did RTFM, and there's key info missing

[Nova Express]

Key information missing from the article:

1. Die size: How big is it?
   
2. How many watts of power does it consume?
   
3. What is the heat dissipation?
   
4. What is the floating point performance?
   

Without those bits of information, it's impossible to guage exactly who might night this chip, and how successful it might be.