Multicore processor specialist Plurality Ltd is starting to ship evaluation boards and associated development kits for its HyperCore processor, the first designs to emerge from the work on its HyperCore Architecture Line. Commercial 64-core chips are scheduled for Q3 this year.
Plurality, a privately owned company established in 2004 by a group of academic engineers and industrialists in Israel, says its architecture is one of the most scalable general-purpose multi-core processors yet announced, and has demonstrated HyperCore blocks reaching up to 256 cores.
The initial design was implemented on an Altera Stratix II-180 FPGA and incorporates sixteen 32bit RISC cores managed by a high flow rate synchroniser/scheduler, sharing a common memory. The FPGA design comprises a 4Mbit data cache, a 2Mbit instruction cache, four 32bit multipliers and four 64bit dividers.
