14 DAY TRIAL // Tilera has just announced that it has finally started shipping its third-gen TILE-Gx processors in volume, the 16- and 36-core 64-bit CPUs from this product family being the first to arrive together with their companion evaluation systems.
TILE-Gx were designed to come with 16-, 36-, 64- or 100-cores, all of these models featuring a unique architecture that pairs together its cores with six network links.
This way, each core, or tile as the company likes to call it, is connected to the adjacent tiles via 24 network links, each one of these links being dedicated to a specific function.
According to Tilera, in networking applications, this design enables a single TILE-Gx36 to deliver more than 40 gigabits per-second of L2/L3 packet, forwarding performance across small and large packet sizes, using less than 25 watts of power.
Tilera is currently engaged with more than 80 customers and claims 20 design wins for the TILE-Gx family, the company’s most important customers being Harmonic and Mercury Computer Systems.
“Deployed defense applications require the highest possible performance in an environment optimized for size, weight, and power or SWaP,” said Steve Patterson, vice president of product management, Mercury Computer Systems.
“The TILE-Gx family offers a compelling performance per watt metric to minimize SWaP.
“In addition to the TILE-Gx’s high speed I/O and built-in security features, the TILE development platform is based on Linux and uses the C/C++ development environment, combining the performance advantages of multicore processing with a familiar platform based on open standards,” concluded the company’s rep.
Tilera evaluation systems are available as we speak in multiple form-factors, ranging from compact size PCIe cards to high performance appliances.
The Tilera PCI Express cards use a half-size PCB in order to fit a single 36-core TILE-Gx processor, while the full featured appliance can include between one and four such CPUs, for a total of 144 cores in an 1U server.