Tilera claims world's first 100 core processor

Processor manufacturer Tilera has announced the world's first 100-core processor with a design it hopes will change the field of high performance computing.

The company claims its TILE-Gx100 processor is four times faster than anything else on the market and delivers ten times the performance per watt.

“This is truly a remarkable technology achievement,” said Omid Tahernia, Tilera's chief executive.

“Customers will be able to replace an entire board presently using a dozen or more chips with just one of our TILE-Gx processors, greatly simplifying the system architecture and resulting in reduced cost, power consumption, and PC board area.”

While Intel and AMD are building small numbers of very powerful cores Tilera's design relies on a larger network of lower powered processors interlinked to allow each chip to share the resources of others and scale up or down power as needed.

“At various points in microprocessor history there have been breakthroughs that have enabled significant advances in computing, such as when the barrier of single-core clock speed was overcome by the introduction of multicore,” said Sergis Mushell, principal research analyst at Gartner.

“Cloud computing and virtualisation have ushered in a new era of processing power optimisation and utilisation, which has accelerated the roadmaps for multicore architectures and changed the paradigm from a clock frequency discussion of the past to a new discussion about number of cores and core optimization.”

The 40nm GX-100 will be available in the first half of 2011 and the company will be targeting high performance web applications and search systems.

Microsoft and Linux systems haven't yet been ported to the chip and a lot will depend on the support of the developer community if the chip is to succeed.