Tensilica and Energy Efficient Computing


The proposed sustained 10 petaflop and 200 peak petaflop tensilica computer is based on 2008 technology. Over the next few years, Tensilica will have 45 nanometer and 32 nanometer chips with improved energy usage and performance, which would enable affordable supercomputers that are more powerful than 10 petaflops.


Other proposed, in development or completed supercomputers and their how specialized or general purpose they are.


Tensilica and their configurable processors could be used as the basis for exaflop and multi-petaflop computers. The main challenge for faster computers is increasing the amount of computer per watt of power. This power challenge is also critical because computing is using 6% of overall power.

What Tensilica is Doing for More Computing and Less Power

Overall Computing Energy Efficiency Trends

The Green list of supercomputers has a current peak of 536 Mflops per watt

Cell processors (in particular cell broadband engine, Cell/BE) are dominant in energy efficient supercomputers IBM will be producing the Cell at 45 nanometers early in 2009 and said it would require 40 percent less power at the same clockspeed than its 65nm predecessor and that the die area would shrink by 34 percent.

The trend is to mixing different types of processors (FPGAs, Cell processors, GPGPUs, floatingpoint accelerators and more) to get more energy efficient computing.

The configurable Tensilica processors provide a wider range of processor types and flexibility.