Tilera To Release 100-Core Processor

angry tapir writes "Tilera has announced new general-purpose CPUs, including a 100-core chip. The two-year-old startup's Tile-GX series of chips are targeted at servers and appliances that execute Web-related functions such as indexing, Web search and video search. The Gx100 100-core chip will draw close to 55 watts of power at maximum performance."

Comments

Custom ISA?

[Henriok]

Massive amounts or cores are cool and all that, but if the instruction set isn't any standard type (ie x86, Sparc, ARM, PowerPC or MIPS) chances are that it won't see light outside highly customized applications. Sure, Linux will probably run it. Linux run on anything, but it won't be put in a regular computer other than as an accelerator of some sort, like GPUs which are massively multicore too. Intel's Larrabee though..

Re:This is great !

[BadAnalogyGuy]

By the way I just typed "make menuconfig" and it wiil let you enter a number up to 512 in the "Maximum number of CPUs" field, so the Linux kernel seems ready for up to 512 CPUs (or cores, they are handled the same way by Linux it seems) as far I can tell by this simple test. Entering a number greater than 512 gives the "You have made an invalid entry" message

Whoa. If you change the source a little, you can enter 1000000 into the Maximum number of CPUs field! Linux is ready for up to a million cores.

If you change the code a little more, when I enter a number that's too high for menuconfig, it says "We're not talking about your penis size, Holmes"

Re:This is great !

[TheRaven64]

And this is one of the reasons why Linux is such a pain to program for. If you actually want any of this information from a program, you need to parse /proc/cpuinfo. Unfortunately, every architecture decides to format this file differently, so porting from Linux/x86 to Linux/PowerPC or Linux/ARM requires you to rewrite this parser. Contrast this with *BSD, where the same information is available in sysctls, so you just fire off the one that you want (three lines of code), don't need a parser, and can use the same code on all supported architectures. For fun, try writing code that will get the current power status or number and speed of the CPUs. I've done that, and the total code for supporting NetBSD, OpenBSD, FreeBSD and Solaris on all of their supported architectures was less than the code for supporting Linux/x86 (and doesn't work on Linux/PowerPC).