Tilera Goes After AMD, Intel, With 100-Core CPU

Tilera Corporation earlier today announced its TILE-Gx family of processors, thus revealing the company's intentions on taking on CPU giants Intel and Advanced Micro Devices. The new series consists of four multi-core processors: 16, 36, 64, and a whopping 100 cores that could ultimately "simplify system architecture." The company even threw on the fighting gloves in its announcement, claiming that the TILE-Gx provides ten-times better compute efficiency than Intel's Westmere.

Omid Tehwenia, Tilera's CEO, said that customers would be able to yank out the twelve or more processors currently encompassing systems with just one TILE-Gx processor. Not only does it simplify the system architecture, but there's a reduced cost, an overall reduced power consumption, and even provides more space in the PC board area. "This is truly a remarkable technology achievement," he boasted.

Tilera provided a few technical specs, reporting that the processors are fabricated in TSMC's 40 nanometer process. The processors also provide speeds up to 1.5 GHz, and will use between 10 and 55 watts of power. Tilera's TILE-Gx family also features hardware acceleration engines, integrated high-performance DDR3 controllers, enhanced SIMD instruction extensions, and more.

The company said that the TILE-Gx16 (16-core version) would be ideal for cost-sensitive applications, whereas the TILE-Gx100 would be perfect for performance applications.  The TILE-Gx32 is expected to be available for sampling in Q4 2010, with the other family members coming out of the closet in the following two quarters.

  • masterasia
    How much?
    Reply
  • quantum mask
    How much is this gonna cost?
    Reply
  • frozenlead
    I want benchmarks.

    Even if these things are amazingly powerful, 98/100 cores (on occasion 96) still won't be able to be really utilized. Software just isn't that advanced yet.
    Reply
  • dlux
    This is just excessive to the point of being silly. Frozenlead has it right. What good is that many cores when 4 of them these days don't even get used by a majority of programs.
    Reply
  • ominous prime
    Interesting, but I'd like to see benchmarks to back up their claims on reduced power consumption. As well as out performing other CPU's on the market. Also 100 cores seems a tad excessive, and more cores doesn't always equate to more performance.
    Reply
  • ravewulf
    Prices? Benchmarks? Programs that can take advantage of that many cores?

    Definitely interesting, but I've never heard of them before this article.
    Reply
  • cyberkuberiah
    frozenleadI want benchmarks.Even if these things are amazingly powerful, 98/100 cores (on occasion 96) still won't be able to be really utilized. Software just isn't that advanced yet.
    these processors are for servers with massive number of threads running , not for our average desktop !
    Reply
  • you guys are loosing the point.The market segment Tilera is after is the business one.....And those programs are multi-core(16+ at least) optimized for quite a long time
    Reply
  • deathblooms2k1
    It's not excessive. You need to get out of the personal/gaming use mentality. Back when 800 Mhz was the high end processing speed people thought anything over a GHz was excessive. I could already see the usefulness of this in regards to server virtualization.
    Reply
  • TwoDigital
    Um, what are these CPU compatible with? Do they run some form of Linux? Do they have an emulation stack for x86 or x64 instructions? As soon as I see what this thing has for processing you could say it has a billion cores and it would be nearly useless.
    Reply