Tilera debuts its sixty-four core processor, melts faces

Chipmaker Tilera, clearly bored with the peasant-like core counts of two or four as offered by such pedestrian competition like Intel and AMD, has decided to turn the game up a notch with their latest diabolical creation: the 64-core processor. That's right folks, Tilera's TILE64 is a new RISC CPU aimed at integrated systems like routers, switches, video conferencing, and set-top boxes that can best Intel's finest by a factor of 30, and casually rocks a bandwidth of something like 32TB per second. The new chip circumvents bottleneck problems that can plague CPUs like Intel's multi-core processors by utilizing a unique "mesh" architecture which allows each core to be decentralized and thus able to communicate more freely with any partner in the grid. Tilera believes the technology might open the door to hundreds or even thousands of cores using the new system. Of course, this is a RISC CPU, so clearly the applications in which it will be used differ somewhat from Intel's offerings, but nevertheless, it remains a tantalizing development in the world of multi-core R&D.

[Via TG Daily]

[Chuckles McGee @ Aug 20th 2007 1:41PM]

Will it play Doom?

[derek @ Aug 20th 2007 1:45PM]

yes, dipshit

[Jonathan Keim @ Aug 20th 2007 1:44PM]

Yeah, and it will also blend...

[captain underpants and the bringdown gang @ Aug 20th 2007 3:10PM]

Its kind of pointless at this point, unless we suddenly learn how to increase the bandwidth of the System Bus and the RAM by a factor of 10-20 thousand.

[Matt @ Aug 20th 2007 1:43PM]

Vaporware...

[John Stracke @ Aug 21st 2007 9:16AM]

It's already shipping.

[Andy @ Aug 20th 2007 1:44PM]

I, for one, welcome our new multicore RISC overlords.

[Joshua @ Aug 20th 2007 1:44PM]

"Risc architecture is gonna change everything."
"Yeah Risc is good."

Hackers FTW!

[derek @ Aug 20th 2007 1:49PM]

this looks really cool, i can't wait for it to start being integrated...

[tehpwnmstr @ Aug 20th 2007 2:05PM]

64? thats it? I'm still usign my 300mhz p2 for web browsing and starcraft. i just disable flash when i dont need it, and its all good. :)

[wiidude420 @ Aug 20th 2007 2:07PM]

intels 80 core is supposed to hit the consumer market in 3-4 years anyways

[Xzavier @ Aug 21st 2007 1:01AM]

80 cores! 3-4 years away??? What ever happent to Intel's 20ghz processor?

3rd paragraph down.
http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/backgrnd/20011008tech_bkgrd.htm
http://www.gcn.com/online/vol1_no1/17562-1.html

Can I get that 20ghz processor in multi cores please... or at leaset a duel core!

[tehpwnmstr @ Aug 20th 2007 2:09PM]

I think the real thing im interest in here is the 32 TB bandwidth. damn. can i get one of these for my counterstrike server?

[Mredraider @ Aug 20th 2007 2:20PM]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC

According to this wiki, RISC type processors include PowerPC and SPARC. I would not have believed that based on the typical embedded nature of RISC CPU based designs (see also "Microcontrollers")

I doubt, though, that these processors will ever run Doom. :)

[The General @ Aug 20th 2007 2:23PM]

Doom is open source.

Doom will run on anything with a frame buffer and a CPU.

[Carlton @ Aug 20th 2007 2:38PM]

Of course, someone will have Doom run on it. I can run Doom on by iAudio X5 (can't really play it though) care of the Rockbox firmware.

As the parent mentions though, this is certainly not an "apples for apples" comparison, since the Core's are CISC chips (at least by the classical definition). Still, quite an amazing chip.

[Haxxy @ Aug 20th 2007 2:42PM]

Yeah, well I'll bet it'll never run Duke Nukem Forever.

[Mike @ Aug 20th 2007 2:44PM]

The only place this chip will wind up is in number crunching super computers. This will be doing things like making weather predictions, mashing through particle data, etc. Sorry, no Doom.

There is a small possibility you could use this for something like a web server or other server that requires a massive number of operations with low overhead but it would require a lot of software engineering and cost a lot...RISC is good for tearing through simple operations, the more cores per proc the better cause it reduces power/cooling/hardware costs.

[Andir3.0 @ Aug 20th 2007 3:32PM]

The PS3, Wii, and XBox360 are all RISC processors...

[Xzavier @ Aug 20th 2007 5:17PM]

Are you trying to tell me that I really don't have DOOM running on my PowerMAC 2.5 Quad processor? Let me find the site that I d/l it from so I can return it in an upload!

Come on bro...

[injate @ Aug 20th 2007 2:42PM]

what does each core run at? 50mhz or so would by my guess...

[John Stracke @ Aug 20th 2007 3:50PM]

600-900 MHz.

[kai @ Aug 20th 2007 2:50PM]

who needs porn when you have little 64-core packages of pure awesomeness?

[citizen024 @ Aug 21st 2007 6:36AM]

you spelled p0rn wrong

[Andir3.0 @ Aug 21st 2007 8:32AM]

It's pr0n... get it right yourself!

[Pingspike @ Aug 20th 2007 2:52PM]

So I guess you haven't heard of the chips from XMOS and Pico then. (Pico being almost exactly the same as these, XMOS's being superior infact.)
injate: Pico's risc multicores run at 100mhz so I'd guess these are similar if not the same.
So when are the XMOS, Pico, Lattice etc articles coming to engadget? Would be remiss to only shout about 1 chip/company now wouldn't it.

[roger_huston @ Aug 20th 2007 3:05PM]

I really hope they make a dual cpu mobo for this thing...

[El Diablo @ Aug 20th 2007 3:16PM]

Id like to see .nix running on it, and an optimized video transcoder to convert all my movies nice and quick.

[Natedog @ Aug 20th 2007 3:43PM]

"best Intel's finest by a factor of 30"

Are we talking besting Intel's number of cores by a factor of 30? Because 4x30=120 > 64...

[Andir3.0 @ Aug 20th 2007 4:14PM]

From the article: "30 times the power efficiency of Intel's dual-core Xeon processors."

[shakman @ Aug 20th 2007 3:51PM]

Has anyone here ever heard of "Acorn" or "RISC OS"?

I used to game on an Acorn StrongARM "RiscPC" PC back in the mid 90's (yep, it was an early version the StrongARM chip you see in portables these days.) I also performed raster and vector design and did all of my office-type productivity on one. It took about 3 years for Microsoft to catch up with RISC OS and Intel a lot longer to catch up with ARM (by eventually buying them out).

The StrongARM/RISC OS PC I used back then had about 16Mb RAM and a 'tiny' HDD but ran apps equivalent to CorelDRAW with lightning speed straight off a floppy disk (I think they formatted to 1.6Mb on Acorn from memory - it still read DOS formatted 1.44Mb disks though).

I remember playing Duke Nukem, Wolfenstein, Lemmings and some cool 3d UFO demo on it. Load times and game response was unreal. It's a shame they couldn't get enough market share to stay in the game. I used to blow my fellow IT geek friends away with my RiscPC back in the day. I can only dream of a new incarnation of RISC OS buddied up with one of these CPUs, a gig or two of RAM and 100Gb+ HDD. Read: Doom times 1000.

[Andir3.0 @ Aug 20th 2007 4:05PM]

*nix is about your only choice for running RISC processors anymore. I don't see MS (but maybe Apple will continue) supporting it in the near future.

[shaun @ Aug 20th 2007 4:15PM]

Do u mean Acorn computers? We used to have those in my primary school, they were god-awful!

[shakman @ Aug 20th 2007 4:29PM]

The standard Acorn computers in schools were quite average but they were usually one or two generations behind (i.e. schools would often pick up cheap 'old-tech' Acorns as they were great teaching tools.)

The StrongARM RISC PCs were brilliant. As with any decent platform though, you had spend some cash on decent apps to take full advantage of the capabilities of the PC. They were very easy to program as well.

Aside from the power of the StrongARM, the Operating System that was designed specifically for this chip was way ahead of its time. Acorn had a "task bar" well before Microsoft brought out Windows 95 and it was unique (i.e. not a Mac rip-off by any means.) There is quite a strong rumour that Bill Gates showed RISC OS to his head engineers when he wanted a 'revolutionary Operating system' designed.

[risc_user @ Aug 21st 2007 12:12AM]

The 3d ufo game demo, was called Virus.

Check out wikipedia and do a search for virus (computer game).

[Eldiablo @ Aug 21st 2007 7:27AM]

It may have been 'lander' that you were thinking of. It came in a demo, but apparently there was a full game available, not that I was ever able to land without exploding into a big ball of flames.

The RiscOS PC's were proper Bo! They infact helped me pass my Computing GCSE - I built a relational DB on my old 386 at some (may have been foxpro or something) then used the RiscOS PC emulator to demonstrate it at school. It ran quicker emulated than it did on my home system.

You can still buy Risc systems, but I'd have to venture that it would be a risky undertaking (pun intented).

Anyone remember a litte destop widget (yeah, not such a new invetion Apple/Yahoo/Google!) that played an animation of a train that got hijacked by bandits, then the bandits got chased by the cops?

[John Stracke @ Aug 21st 2007 9:35AM]

"It took about 3 years for Microsoft to catch up with RISC OS and Intel a lot longer to catch up with ARM (by eventually buying them out)." -- Intel didn't buy ARM; ARM is still an independent company. ARM doesn't produce chips; they license the design. Digital created the StrongARM chip based on ARM's design. Intel got StrongARM in 1997, as part of the settlement after Digital sued Intel for patent infringement. They turned StrongARM into XScale, then sold XScale to Marvell in 2006.

[shakman @ Aug 21st 2007 11:19AM]

Eldiablo, you are correct. It was Lander, and it was sweet.

John Stracke, thanks for the history lesson, however a quick looksy tells a different story: "The StrongARM microprocessor is a faster version of the Advanced RISC Machines ARM design. It was created by Digital Equipment Corporation, but later sold to Intel who continued to manufacture it, before replacing it with the XScale." It was introduced in 1995. Fortunately Acorn had already developed an Operating System specifically for the DEC ARM chips so RISC OS and StrongARM were a match made in heaven. Intel realised that the only way to catch DEC was to buy the chip.

And Microsoft knew the only way to achieve global domination was to steal ideas from their main competitors (read: threats to market share) which included Acorn. But surely we all knew that already.

[shakman @ Aug 21st 2007 11:34AM]

Found it: !Lander aka Zarch (name of the full version)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%21Lander

Released on the Archimedes in 1987 and ran like lightning. This was before the redesigned RiscPC and StrongARM chips which is a tribute to the Acorn Operating System (RISC OS).

I always wonder what the world would have been like if Acorn/Castle could have gained a considerable foothold in the industry. The OS is still under development by a new mob I believe unfortunately now it's mainly just limited to hobbyist's and die-hard Acorn fans which makes it way to $$$ especially if I have to convert my Aussie dollars to GB Pounds.

[John Stracke @ Aug 20th 2007 4:02PM]

Engadget, where did you see the word "RISC"? Google doesn't find it anywhere on Tilera's site; it doesn't show up in their product pages or their press release; and I haven't been able to find anything on their site describing the actual instruction architecture.

Actually, this tile architecture reminds me of nothing so much as the transputer. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transputer

[Andir3.0 @ Aug 20th 2007 4:07PM]

They got it from the article they linked to: http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/33451/135/

[John Stracke @ Aug 20th 2007 4:10PM]

Got it; I just followed the Read link. So maybe TG Daily jumped to conclusions instead of Engadget.

[shaun @ Aug 20th 2007 4:05PM]

"Everybody, RUN!! Global warming is coming!!"

[cr0ft @ Aug 20th 2007 5:38PM]

This is interesting, but even more so is Sun's new SPARC generation. The UltraSPARC T2 has 8 cores, each with a dedicated FPU, and it can process 64 threads simultaneously. There's also other stuff, like built-in cryptographic stuff and 10GB networking.

That's in a chip that is binary compatible backwards to the other SPARC chips, so just fire up Solaris on that baby and you have one heck of a number cruncher.

All that in a chip that draws 90-something watts... Sun is definitely kicking butt and taking names these days.

[Mike @ Aug 20th 2007 5:43PM]

I always suspected that companies like Intel and others throttle their production far beyond the point of their true capabilities, just to sell crap products for many time. Imagine if Intel launched today a 80 core chip. What would they sell next? A 160 core chip? So, what they do is to sell a crappy 2, then crappy 4, crappy 6.... until they arrive at 80 they have made much money. Launching the best today is to be buried on the own product.

[Marshillboy @ Aug 20th 2007 5:58PM]

I don't care what it's "intended uses" are. I'll use my own processor for whatever uses I see fit [cough]videogames[/cough]. Rendering might be another good use, perhaps.

[bombastinator @ Aug 20th 2007 7:12PM]

OSX May be able to port to it. Mac has used RISC before iirc. I think they may be having too much fun with the Microsoft compatibility though atm.

[Chris Kiick @ Aug 20th 2007 7:30PM]

Sun Microsystems just announced a 64-core RISC chip last week. What off-the-shelf software can this chip run, Hmmm?

[David @ Aug 20th 2007 8:02PM]

RISC (reduced instruction set computer), I remember my Macintosh Performa 6300's, burnt in a hurrican Power lose used a IBM CPU PowerPC 603e 100 - 120 MHz.

Put a couple hundreds of those TILE64’s and that can be a precursor toy box for a Artificial Intelligence Programmer - neutral network, hyper advance search algorithms, Cellular Automata so forth and so on.
I am sure Crey, NSA, SGI, Google, Microsoft or Wolfram Research have exclusive access to those bad boys.

[Jamo @ Aug 20th 2007 10:32PM]

I bet this thing is faster than the speed that electricity travels. It could probably run without solid memory just running clock cycles with the data over and over again. What does everyone think?