100 Processors Into Single Chip

Forget dual-core and quad-core processors,a semiconductor company promises to pack 100 cores into a processor that can be used in applications that require hefty computing punch, like video conferencing, wireless base stations and networking. By comparison, Intel’s latest chips are expected to have just eight cores.

The company that is making the 100-core chip.Tilera’s revolutionary architecture provides superior performance because it eliminates the on-chip bus interconnect, a centralized intersection that information must flow through between processor cores or between cores and the memory and I/O. As manufacturers have added more cores to chips, the bus (or ring) has created an information traffic jam because all data from these additional cores must travel through a single one-dimensional path.
Tilera’s architecture eliminates the dependence on a bus, and instead puts a non-blocking, cut-through switch on each processor core, which connects it to a two dimensional on-chip mesh network called iMesh™.This combination of the switch and a processor is called a ’tile’. The iMesh provides each tile with more than a terabit/sec of interconnect bandwidth, creating a more efficient distributed architecture and eliminating  on-chip data congestion. Multiple parallel meshes are used in order to separate different transaction types and provide more deterministic interconnect throughput.