Aditya Kothadiya's Blog

The demand for more computing performance causes CPU designers to come up with innovative architectures of microprocessors. The performance of an application can be increased if we run those applications in parallel. Using multiple independent CPUs is one common method used to increase a system’s overall parallelism. But instead of using mulitple CPUs on different chips, CPU designers came up with a technology where two or more independent cores are manufactured into a single piece of silicon integrated circuit.

A dual-core device contains two independent microprocessors and a quad-core device contains four microprocessors on a single chip. Cores in a multi-core device may share a single coherent cache (temporary storage area) at the highest on-device  level or may have separate caches. The processors also share the same interconnect to the rest of the system. In order to deliver high computing general-purpose processors, manufacturers such as Intel and AMD have turned to multi-core designs.

The general trend in processor development has been from multi-core to many-core: from dual, quad, eight-core chips to ones with tens or even hundreds of cores. AMD released its dual-core server/workstation processors, the Opteron, and its dual-core desktop processors, the Athlon. Intel launched its quad core processor, and Core Duo microprocessors with dual-core technology.

Tilera Corp. has begun shipping a 64-core processor – TILE64 to customers.
It is targeting embedded applications like networking and
digital video, and is not meant to compete with multicore processors
being marketing by Intel and AMD.

The TILE64 has 64 identical processor cores or tiles — that are interconnected. Each tile is a complete full-featured processor, including integrated
L1 & L2 cache and a non-blocking switch that connects the tile into
the mesh. This means that each tile can independently run a full
operating system, or multiple tiles taken together can run a
multi-processing operating system like SMP Linux.

With a standard ANSI C programming environment, developers can leverage
their existing software investment as well as utilize the vast body of
Open Source code available. Tiles can be grouped into clusters to apply
the appropriate amount of horsepower to each application. Since
multiple operating system instances can be run on the TILE64™
simultaneously, it can replace multiple CPU subsystems for both the
data plane and control plane.


The technology was developed by MIT professor Anant Agarwal, founder of
Tilera; he continues today as the company’s chief technology officer.