Print
We know what you're thinking. With a 100-core processor, you can finally play Crysis with all the eye candy turned up and still have CPU cycles left over for Folding@home. That's probably true, but that's not what Tilera's new TILE-Gx 3000 processor family is intended for. These general purpose chips are destined for data centers where, according to Tilera, they have a distinct advantage over Intel's Sandy Bridge processors.
"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."
According to Tilera, it's new chips, which are being offered in 36-core, 64-core, and 100-core flavors, deliver a 10-fold performance-per-watt advantage over Intel's Sandy Bridge CPUs ultimately reducing the total cost of ownership by around 50 percent.
"The reason we can go against Sandy Bridge architecture is [Intel's range] was designed for general-purpose [applications], so it has to account for single-threaded performance and power-point performance and Windows," Bishara told ZDNet UK. "What we're targeting here is a very specific [high throughput] application... If we compare our chip to Sandy Bridge in the standard enterprise application, we will not do well."
Where the TILE-Gx 3000 series is supposed to thrive is in data centers running throughput-oriented applications such as cloud computing, database applications like NoSQL and in-memory databases, data mining chores like Hadoop, and video transcoding.
Tilera will begin sampling the 36-core version of its new processor family in July, with the 64-core and 100-core variants due in early 2012.
Image Credit: Tilera
Comments are closed on this article
surfinsam
July 11, 2011 at 1:58pm
Tilera announed this at least a year ago probably more and these procs only have speeds between 1 and 1.5ghz
thetechchild
June 23, 2011 at 8:37pm
They say that the chips are "high frequency", so I'm wondering how these compare to GPUs, which probably have more cores and lower frequency.
PCLinuxguy
June 23, 2011 at 4:20pm
while it may be for datacenters, so was the intel Xeon chipsets, yet some people have built gaming rigs with them (like the 2010 MaximumPC dream machine) cost is going to be high, but something tells me that if people want it bad enough, there might be consumer versions in the pipeline, but maybe not 100 core.. maybe 10-12 core (non hyperthreading like Intel's do)
