Tilera announces multicore Gx processors

The computer industry has become almost fixated on power issues. Power-per-watt is the new metric for CPUs and GPUs, and everything from chips to data centers are now power-limited. The Tilera corp. has developed a series of multicore processors which could dramatically reduce power consumption for certain computing tasks. For tasks not requiring floating-point performance, such as networking, serving web pages, wireless infrastructure,and digital video, Tilera’s chips offer an unprecedented level of compute efficiency. Tilera today has officially introduced the third generation, 40 nm, Gx-16 and Gx-36 64-bit processors, with 16 and 36 cores respectively. The company is claiming that these solutions offer twice the performance at half the power and size and 1/3 the cost compared to current solutions. In certain applications the tile Gx-36 can offer performance equivalent to a xeon for one-fifth the power and one-eighth the space. Tilera has already garnered 20 design wins, and plans to unveil a 100 core product later this year. In a 2010 interview Tilera’s Bob Doud predicted 1,000 core chips by 2020. Some have speculated that a combination of low-power processors coupled with next-generation GPUs may be the optimal way to build an exaflop supercomputer.

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