[Beowulf] Tilera targets Intel, AMD with 100-core processor

[Nifty Tom Mitchell]

On Mon, Oct 26, 2009 at 12:32:04PM -0400, Mark Hahn wrote:
> 
>> So unless your application sits in the on-core cache, I am wondering 
>> where the real benefit
>> is going to be (ignoring the fact that the processor is still PCI-e
>
> "serve Web data" seems to be the target, as mentioned in the release.
> that seems pretty fair, since web servers tend to have pretty small

Add deep packet inspection to the list.
Their literature is full of example data points for this.

However with this many processing cores other things 
seem possible including encryption and decryption so 
firewalls and network management tools make sense as
embedded targets.

Their compiler and tool chain is apparently open source so when they 
open up that package a lot more will be known.  PCI-e
seems to be an issue but there are some other links
on the part that might let large memory high internal bandwidth
systems be built.

If it can appear to be a general purpose system it might have value in
the markets that Azul was targeting for their multiprocessor boxes where
the application sitting in in core is a Java interpreter.

Too bad the economic/investment environment is so upside down.  
This looks much more interesting than 10,000 lines of php
and teen age web eyeball counts.

I have not looked at the power budget but 10U of 100 cores per U
is a lot of processor elements to harness.

Interesting stuff.