Tilera launches 72 core processor for data centre applications

The TILE-Gx72 processor is said to round out the company's offering for the moment. According to Bob Doud, director of processor strategy, the chip is '1.5 to 2 times better than anything on the market'. "We're bringing a lot of engines to bear on today's problems," he claimed. The Gx72 features four high performance DDR3 memory controllers, supporting more than 475Gbit/s, to drive the next generation of network, multimedia and cloud infrastructure. "We believe Tilera parts can handle more traffic by bringing more cores to bear," Doud continued. "But the part is there to handle front end tasks; there will still be x86 based servers behind it. The Tilera part will be there to filter traffic and to do similar tasks; whatever needs to be done." Also featured in the part is Tilera's iMesh interconnect, offering more than 110Tbit/s of bandwidth to interconnect cores, caches, I/O devices and DDR3 memory controllers. There is 23Mbyte of on chip cache memory and a range of I/O features, including eight 10G Ethernet ports, which can be configured as 32 1Gbit/s port. Also featured are six PCI Express ports with 24 lanes of serdes. Tilera has remained at the 40nm node for this device. Doud said this was to 'get the chip out and reduce risk'. "However, we are now working on our 28nm designs and these will offer more than 100 cores."