Tilera TILE-Gx100 may beat Intel

Tilera on Monday unveiled a new processor it hopes will unseat Intel from its overall lead in performance. The TILE-Gx100 counts on a massively parallel, 100-core architecture to handle many tasks at once and reportedly overcomes some of the problems of scaling inherent to many-core designs. Instead of using a data bus, the grid is treated as a mesh network with switches on each core to route data smoothly. The approach lets Tilera reach the core count without it stalling or without the added space dictated by the bus architecture.

Breaking with conventional design is said to make the design ten times as power-efficient as Intel's 32 nanometer Westmere architecture, even with a 40nm TILE-Gx chip, and may be as much as four times as faster as Intel's future eight-core Xeons based on its Nehalem-EX design.

Intel has its own approach with similar routing but has so far only shown an 80-core research design not due to reach production hardware for the next few years.

The 100-core chip should be available by early 2010 and will already support x86 apps through recompiling code, though fully native support isn't expected in the foreseeable future. [via Wired]

By Electronista Staff