Tilera Releases 64-Way Chip Dev Tools 72
eldavojohn writes to tell us that Tilera has released a Linux-based development kit for their 64-core system on a chip. "The Tile64 is based on a proprietary VLIW (very long instruction word) architecture, on which a MIPS-like RISC architecture is implemented in microcode. A hypervisor enables each core to run its own instance of Linux, or alternatively the whole chip can run Tilera's 64-way SMP (symmetrical multiprocessing) Linux implementation. An 'iMesh' switching interconnect, developed by Tilera's founder, MIT professor and serial entrepreneur Dr. Anant Agarwal, is said to eliminate the centralized bus intersection that limited scalability in previous multicore designs."
CISC? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Hope it wasn't released under the GPL (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.news.com/5208-1030_3-0.html?forumID=1&threadID=2246&messageID=11919&start=-1 [news.com]
http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=389856&cid=21705136 [slashdot.org]
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=67877&no_d2=1&cid=6220788 [slashdot.org]
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=159323&cid=13343214 [slashdot.org]
http://www.kuro5hin.org/comments/2003/2/13/8422/16656/11#11 [kuro5hin.org]
I think the biggest thing keeping this troll from being truly informative is the lack of understanding of the licence, and the deliberate mis-statement of its effects. Its fictitious and incorrect pronouncements virtually guarentee that nobody with even rudimentary analytical skills will believe it. After my experience with these beliefs, I won't be recommending them any of my associates. I may reconsider if it switches to something a little more believable, like the HIV-protective benefits of nailing your head to the floor. Until then its attempts to deliberately distort the facts about what you can and cannot do with in-house software that's not for external distribution shall continue to attract such a flurry of indignant responses that it's easy to believe that Mother Henrietta Hickey's day job is posting anti-GPL FUD.
Thank you for your time.
Simple version. (Score:5, Informative)
I like the idea, I like the idea a lot, but the fact that they opted for a simple but slow topology doesn't fill me with hope. Especially as they suggest running SMP over it. Processors close to the centre of the "mesh" will be resource-starved. There needs to be strong affinity of a given thread to a given core, where the weighting is by the operations expected and where that weighting can (and will) shift as code blocks change or new threads start. In other words, you want something that is semi-static, semi-dynamic according to need. Only the OS is capable of obtaining that kind of information, so it is the OS that needs to do the dividing, NOT the architecture underneath OR a system administrator.
Re:Simple version. (Score:2, Informative)
I like the idea, I like the idea a lot, but the fact that they opted for a simple but slow topology doesn't fill me with hope.