14 DAY TRIAL // One wouldn't immediately think that an upstart company would be too quick to successfully challenge the established representatives of the processor market, but Tilera might have actually managed it.
Intel and Advanced Micro Devices both are working on multi-core processors for the cloud, but they might have to make room for Tilera chips soon.
Turns out that the young maker of many-core general purpose microprocessors finished the TILE-Gx 3000 processor family.
This line is one that should be able to power data canters running such things as video transcoding operations, database applications (NoSQL for example), web applications with low latency and high throughput, etc.
“We have been working with the largest cloud computing companies for two years to design a processor that addresses their biggest pain points. The TILE-Gx 3000 series has features like 64-bit processing, virtualization support and high processor frequency, which were specifically implemented for our web customers,” says Ihab Bishara, Director of Server Solutions, Tilera.
“The era of 20-30 percent incremental gains is over. The Gx-3000 series provides the order of magnitude improvements the industry is looking for.”
In a stunning turn of events, the purported performance per watt of these newcomers is 10 times higher than the one delivered by Intel's Sandy Bridge chips.
This means that total cost of ownership (TCO) can go down by 50% while power consumption and footprint are, likewise, drastically reduced.
Three chips exist at the moment, named Gx3036, Gx3064 and GX3100, with 36, 64 and 100 cores, respectively.
In that order, they have cache memory of 12/20/32 MB, power consumption of 20/35/48 Watts and dual/quad/quad channel DDR3 support.
Skeptics might be interested i learning that, even though sample chips haven't even been sent out yet (and availability is set for Q3 2011 and Q1 2012), Tilera has already received actual chip orders.