Posted on Wednesday, June 23 2010 @ 9:15 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
ARS Technica
reports Tilera and Quanta have presented a new cloud server that packs 512 cores into just two rack units:
Never having seen a set of third-party benchmarks for a Tilera CPU, I can't really speak to the company's success in boosting CPU performance, but it has now repackaged the many-core + mesh idea as a performance per watt play for cloud datacenters. In connection with this cloud push, Tilera and Quanta are announcing a new "cloud server," the S2Q, that packs 512 cores into just two rack units. This is considerably less space (and power) than the 512-core SeaMicro server announced last week but, despite having the same core count and target market, the two aren't necessarily directly comparable.
Tilera's cores implement a very simple VLIW design with two integer ALUs and a load-store pipe (at least, I'm pretty sure that the third execution pipeline is load-store). Each core also has a small bit of L1 and L2 cache associated with it, and it's connected to the larger mesh network and to a chip-wide, fully coherent L3 cache via a small, private switch. The lack of floating-point and vector hardware won't really hurt Tilera much on cloud workloads, but the differences between 512 cores of Tilera and 512 cores of Atom are much deeper than just a lack of support for two popular arithmetic types.
