Tilera Shipping 'Mega-Multicore' Chip

Startup Tilera announced Monday that the company has begun shipping what you might call a "mega-multicore" chip, the TILE64, one that can scale to hundreds or thousands of cores.

Unfortunately, you won't be using it, however, unless you're involved in the design of network switches or CGI render farms.

Tilera, like the name suggests, is a "tiled" architecture, one that connects each processor through an I/O network. What's interesting is that the design of the chip is pretty conventional; each core has a level 1 and level 2 cache for storing instructions, like a PC processor, and each core connects to the others via shared L3 cache. That's pretty efficient.

And the really interesting thing? Each core can run Linux. But there's no indication that that phrase means that the chip can run anything but a specifically modeled Linux kernel, and not a more mainstream implementation like Ubuntu.