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Tilera To Release 100-Core Processor

Posted by timothy on from the and-then-they-stopped-counting dept.

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."

4 of 191 comments (clear)

  1. This is great ! by ls671 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I can't wait to see the output of :

    cat /proc/cpuinfo

    I guess we will need to use:

    cat /proc/cpuinfo | less

    When we reach 1 million cores, we will need to rearrange the output of cat /proc/cpuinfo to eliminate redundant information ;-))

    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 ;-(

    Note: You need to turn on "Support for big SMP systems with more than 8 CPUs" flag as well.

     

    --
    Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
  2. When does a CPU become the CPU? by LaurensVH · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It appears from the article that it's a new, separate architecture to which the kernel hasn't been ported yet, so these are add-on processors that can help reduce the load on the actual CPU, at least for now. So, em, two things: 1. How exactly does that work without kernel level support? They claimed having ported separate apps (MySQL, memcached, Apache), so this might suggest a generic kernel interface and userspace scheduling. 2. How does this fix the apps they ported being mostly IO bound in a lot of cases and 99% of the cores will still just be eating out of their noses?

    1. Re:When does a CPU become the CPU? by broken_chaos · · Score: 4, Interesting

      How does this fix the apps they ported being mostly IO bound in a lot of cases and 99% of the cores will still just be eating out of their noses?

      Loads and loads of RAM/cache, possibly?

  3. Been there, done that, got the T-Shirt... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    OK, so big disclaimer: I work for Sun (not Oracle, yet!)

    The Sun Niagara T1 chip came out over 3 years ago, and it did 32 threads on 8 cores.
    And drew something around 50W (200W for a fully-loaded server). And under $4k.

    The T2 systems came out last year, do 64 threads/CPU for a similar power budget. And even less $/thread.

    The T3 systems likely will be out next year (I don't know specifically when, I'm not In The Know), and the threads/chip should double again, with little power increase.

    Of course, per-thread performance isn't equal to anything like a modern "standard" CPU. Though, it's now "good enough" for most stuff - the T2 systems have a per-thread performance equal to about the old Pentium3 chips. I would be flabbergasted if this GX chip had a per-core performance anywhere near that.

    I'm not sure how Intel's Larabee is going to show (it's still nowhere near release), but the T-seres chips from Sun are cheap, open, and available now. And they run Solaris AND Linux. So unless this new GX chip is radically more efficient/higher-performance/less costly, I don't see this company making any impact.

    -Erik