October 27, 2009, 5:22 pm Tilera Taunts Intel With a 100-Core Chip By Ashlee Vance NY Times
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/27/tilera-taunts-intel-with-100-core-chip/?ref=technology If you’re a chip start-up, one of the last things you want to do is draw the attention of Intel. It’s usually best to nibble around the areas Intel has ignored rather than waving a giant red cape, announcing your intent to take a stab at one of Intel’s main businesses. Intel tends to respond to such gestures with incredible force and has bested just about all up and comers. And so, the chip start-up Tilera really put itself to the test this week by boasting that it has created the world’s first 100-core chip – a product capable of giving Intel a run for its money in the high-profit server chip market. Tilera came to life in 2004 and grew out of chip research, much of it funded by the federal government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, done at M.I.T. The company’s founders correctly forecast an era when chip makers would struggle to increase the raw speed of their chips – MHz and GHz – and instead need to focus on adding more cores to each chip to boost performance. To the Tilera founders, it made sense to create an altogether new chip design for this changing world rather than trying to adapt older designs to the multi-core model. The design the Tilera founders concocted included linking lots and lots of smaller, lower-power cores via a type of mesh network where each core could more easily share information with other members of the chip. In addition, Tilera bundled a number of components right on its chip that other companies tend to keep as separate modules. To date, Tilera has sold chips with up to 64 cores to companies that make things like security appliances, video-conferencing systems and streaming video systems. Such products and the software they run have lent themselves to the multicore design. Now Tilera is promoting the 100-core TILE-Gx100, which it said shows four times the performance of any chip announced to date and should carry the company into the server realm. The performance claims are tough to back up, particularly since Tilera is basing some of its comparisons on yet-to-be-released products from Intel. Tilera’s engineers have simply looked at publicly available information on rival chips and predicted how they will perform on certain software tests. That said, Tilera’s executives remain confident that the chip will provide more than enough horsepower to handle mainstream server jobs. Tilera’s internal test scores show the TILE-Gx100 serving Web pages, feeding databases and inspecting data packets at record speeds. One of the big downsides to Tilera’s products is that they require a different instruction set than chips from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, which use the x86 instruction set. Companies that have tried to fight the x86 architecture on general purpose computers have struggled because software developers write code based on x86. Chip industry experts have argued that a product must run about 10 times faster than what is available to make it worth software developers’ effort to fiddle with an atypical instruction set. Tilera claims such a tenfold edge in performance and lower power consumption on certain software jobs. Over the last 10 years, a handful of chip companies have tried to crack Intel’s main markets. But these companies like Transmeta, Montalvo Systems and PA Semi all ran into financing issues and were eventually acquired for their engineering talent rather than their products. Tilera appears to have some staying power. It just closed a third round of funding valued at $25 million. The round included a $10 million investment from Quanta. Quanta, a Taiwanese computer manufacturer, makes servers for a number of large companies, including Dell. Dell has been experimenting with selling servers that run on super-low-power chips, believing such products fit the desires of Internet-centric companies that need to feed Web pages up at the lowest cost. Tilera thinks its chip will be best suited to the Internet set. Intel has been promoting a many-core design similar to Tilera’s, although the project remains in the research and development stage. -- ================================ George Antunes, Political Science Dept University of Houston; Houston, TX 77204 Voice: 713-743-3923 Fax: 713-743-3927 Mail: antunes at uh dot edu *********************************** * POST TO [email protected] * *********************************** Medianews mailing list [email protected] http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
