Topic: 64-core chip promises to be a big leap ahead

[Reno]

This is really neat, but i doubt i'll see this in home machines anytime soon.

A company that's pioneering a new chip architecture based on research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's computer science lab is disclosing today that it has begun to ship a 64-core processor, promising dramatic advances in powering devices for the networking and multimedia industries.

The company, Tilera Corp., was founded by Anant Agarwal, an MIT professor of electrical engineering and computer science who created the first mesh-based multicore architecture in 1996 for the "Raw" project at the school's former Laboratory for Computer Science.

Tilera is based in Santa Clara, Calif., but most of its 64 employees work at a research and development site in Westborough. It started in 2004 and has been operating in stealth mode until now.

At today's Hot Chips semiconductor conference at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif., the company will say it has begun supplying its new TILE64 processor to a dozen customers, including 3Com Corp., Top Layer Networks, Codian Inc., and GoBackTV Inc.

"It's a real disruptive technology," Agarwal said last week. "We pretty much took a clean sheet of paper at MIT and said we're going to deliver a whole new architecture for chips."

Agarwal worked on his Raw microchip, a tiled parallel processor, in the 1990s under the direction of the computer lab's legendary director Michael Dertouzos, who died in 2001. The initiative received tens of millions of dollars in funding from the National Science Foundation and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Later, the lab was merged into CSAIL, MIT's Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in the new Stata Center, where Agarwal now works. And Raw chips were used to power the world's largest microphone array, capable of isolating and capturing individual conversations at a cocktail party, for Project Oxygen, a larger Dertouzos-inspired research project in human-centered computing.

Traditional chips employ "bus architecture," where all programmable cores feed into centralized intersections that move data between them. As more cores are added to processors, it can create traffic jams for data packets that are shuttling between cores. Tilera's technology eliminates that problem by adding communications switches on each core and laying them out on a grid, checkerboard-style, where packets of data can be routed quickly on one of many parallel routes.

"What we've done is to provide as many switches as processors," said Agarwal, who is Tilera's chief technology officer.

The company has raised $40 million in venture capital from Bessemer Venture Partners, Columbia Capital, Walden International, and the VentureTech Alliance arm of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.

With streaming video and other new technologies putting increasing power demands on microprocessors, traditional processor technology is hitting its limits, said Will Strauss, principal analyst at Forward Concepts, a Tempe, Ariz., research firm specializing in semiconductors. Several companies are launching processors using parallel architecture, he said, including Tilera, Ambric Inc. of Beaverton, Ore., and Stream Processors Inc. of Sunnyvale, Calif. Even Intel Corp. has experimented with parallel architecture at its research labs.

"This approach gives you massive computing horsepower at lower clock rates and lower power consumption," Strauss said.

Tilera holds more than 40 patents on its multicore technology. But it remains to be seen whether its TILE64s or other new multicore processors can supplant the dual- and quad-core processors sold by industry leaders Intel and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. for a variety of computing devices, the field-programmable gate array semiconductors marketed by Xilinx Inc and Altera Corp. for networking applications, or the digital signal processors sold by Texas Instruments Inc. and Analog Devices Inc. for digital multimedia applications.

Executives at Tilera say the TILE64s will deliver more than 10 times the performance of current dual-core processors and 40 times the performance of today's digital signal processors.

The technology can be scaled to much larger grids, and eventually could power a range of computer servers, storage devices, and security appliances, as well as sophisticated radars and other military equipment.

"We can go to 100 or even 1,000 processor cores on a single chip," said Tilera marketing director Bob Doud.

For the short term, however, Tilera is targeting just two markets: intelligent networks, where the chips and their associated software will simultaneously transmit and inspect packets of voice data; and, digital multimedia, where they will power the high-definition video marketed by cable providers and teleconferencing companies.

Agarwal said his new company chose to establish its headquarters in Silicon Valley because it was closer to its base of customers, suppliers, and financial backers. At the same time, he said, Tilera's center of gravity remains in Massachusetts, where the engineers at its Westborough research center include veterans of the Alpha microprocessor team from the former Digital Equipment Corp.

"This could very well become the blueprint for how all microprocessors are built in the future," Agarwal said.

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