Tilera announces availability of 36- and 16-core CPUs

Fabless semiconductor company Tilera Corporation, formed in 2004 to develop many-core processing solutions, have announced immediate availability of TILE-Gx36 and TILE-Gx16, the first members of their new TILE-Gx range of 64-bit processors, and evaluation systems to use with them. In line with the company's commitment to produce high-performance processors with low power consumption, these processors offer greater performance per watt than other comparable systems.

TILE-Gx processors come in 2 sub-families, TILE-Gx 3000 series and TILE-Gx 8000 series. The TILE-Gx 3000 series are optimized for Cloud Datacenter applications, and will be available with 36, 64 or 100 cores (or TILEs) on a single device. TILE-Gx 8000 processors are optimized for networking applications, and come with 16, 36, 64 or 100 cores. The cores in a single device are interconnected with Tilera's iMesh on-chip network. A single device can run multiple operating systems, with a separate operating system running on each core, and/or one or more SMP operating systems running on multiple cores.

Naming of the various processors in both series is based on the number of cores, so a 16 core processor is known as TILE-Gx16, 36 cores is known as TILE-Gx36, etc. Currently available models are TILE-Gx 3036, TILE-Gx 8016 and TILE-Gx 8036.

TILE-Gx processors have a complete set of memory and I/O controllers on the die, so don't need separate northbridge or southbridge chips, leading to smaller system sizes and reduced system development costs. Each processor core has 32K L1 instruction cache, 32K L1 data cache and 256K L2 cache, all fed by TileDirect (providing low latency packet processing by means of coherent i/o to each core) and using Dynamic Distributed Cache (enabling scalable performance for multi-threaded and shared memory apps).

	TILE-Gx100	TILE-Gx64	TILE-Gx36	TILE-Gx16
Number of Cores	100	64	36	16
Core frequency	1.2/1.5 GHz	1.2/1.5 GHz	1.0/1.2/1.5 GHz	1.0/1.2 GHz
Network Interface	2x 50G Interlaken / 8 XAUI / 32 SGMII	2x 50G Interlaken / 6 XAUI / 24 SGMII	4 XAUI / 16 SGMII	2 XAUI / 12 SGMII
PCI-E	3 x 8-lanes	3 x 8-lanes	1 x 8-lanes + 2 x 4-lanes	3 x 4-lanes
DDR3 Controllers	4	4	2	2
DDR3 Frequency	1866 MT/s	1600 MT/s	1600 MT/s	1333 MT/s
Package	45 x 45mm BGA	45 x 45mm BGA	37.5 x 37.5mm BGA	37.5 x 37.5mm BGA

The currently available products are in a 37.5mm x 37.5mm BGA package, with larger 64-core and 100-core products available later in a 45x45mm package. The overall functionality is increased for processors with a higher core count, providing more PCI-E lanes and a more powerful network interface on the larger, higher performing chips. Likewise, the 16 and 36 core products currently available have 2 DDR3 controllers, supporting 512GB ECC memory, while the later 64 and 100 core chips will have 4 controllers, presumably supporting 1024 GB ECC memory.

Typical power consumption ranges from 10W to 55W for the TILE-Gx 8000 series, and from 10W to 48W for the TILE-Gx 3000 series, providing an amazing performance-per-watt rating. The only figure Tilera give to back this up is a CoreMark rating of 165,000 for the TILE-Gx36, which it claims is an industry beating record at a fraction of the power usage.