Chipmakers aim to unclog data paths

If you are going to build processors with large numbers of cores, argues Anant Agarwal, you have to figure out how to connect them to each other, too.

A decade of research into that problem has resulted in Tilera, Agarwal's company, which has invented a 64-core processor with an embedded high-speed network that can pass up to 32 terabits of data a second between the various cores.

The company's Tile64--designed for networking equipment and video streaming servers--can provide 10 times the performance of an Intel Xeon chip while consuming far less power, or 40 times the performance of a digital signal processor from Texas Instruments, the company says.