Term of the Moment
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Definition: TILE-Gx
A multicore system-on-chip (SoC) family from Tilera Corporation. Targeting networking, video and datacenter applications, and running a symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) version of Linux, TILE chips are based on an architecture from MIT. The first chip was a 64-core CPU in 2007 (TILE64).
Multiple Caches and a Switch Fabric
Each core has its own L1 and L2 caches and a switch that connects them to each other (a "tile" comprises a core, cache and switch). The chip also contains controllers for memory, Ethernet, PCI Express and serial I/O. All tiles can access the caches of all the other tiles, providing a third cache layer. The chips come with an Eclipse-based software development environment, which includes a C compiler, command line interfaces and simulation and profiling tools for multicore applications.
Seventy-Two Cores
Tilera's First Chip
Multiple Caches and a Switch Fabric
Each core has its own L1 and L2 caches and a switch that connects them to each other (a "tile" comprises a core, cache and switch). The chip also contains controllers for memory, Ethernet, PCI Express and serial I/O. All tiles can access the caches of all the other tiles, providing a third cache layer. The chips come with an Eclipse-based software development environment, which includes a C compiler, command line interfaces and simulation and profiling tools for multicore applications.
Tilera's Gx8072 chip has 24 lanes of PCI Express and up to 100 Gbps of Ethernet I/O. (Image courtesy of Tilera Corporation.)
This block diagram of the TILE64 chip shows the makeup of each core (top). (Images courtesy of Tilera Corporation.)