by Arthur Cole, IT Business Edge
Arthur Cole speaks with Ihab Bishara, director of marketing, Tilera Corp.
Cole: The new Tile-Gx marks a dramatic increase in the number of cores compared to anything else commercially available. What can you tell us about the architecture that allowed you to pack in so many cores?
Bishara: It’s actually very simple. We were able to do it by using standard cores and connecting them with a multi-layered network. We use a 2D mesh network that connects all cores to each other and to a router. We’ve essentially created a huge internet -on-a-chip that can scale to hundreds of cores, not just 100.
In designing the architecture, we focused on making sure each core has enough bandwidth, so we devoted more than a TB per core. This is so you can have multiple messages flowing around in the chip without blocking each other. This is a different approach from current multicore processors, where they take a standard single core, put a bunch of them together and connect them to a bus. The core they are using doesn’t lend itself to multicore operation because it is the legacy core we’ve been working with for years. And the bus is a 1D system, so if one core wants to control it, everything else must get off, which bottlenecks the whole system.
