Monday, August 20, 2007

Tilera’s 64-Core Processor: Power-Efficient, or Just Powerful?

If you’re a tech geek and you’ve spent all morning pulling up your jaw, we bet you’re recovering from today’s news that Tilera Corp. is shipping a Linux-capable 64-core processor.

Developed at MIT, the processor is more energy-efficient than one would expect for a chip with that many cores, but we wouldn’t go so far as calling it green. The chip uses between 170 and 300 mega miliwatts per core, which is impressively efficient. But don’t forget to multiply the per-core energy drain by 64. The processor delivers 10 times the performance and 30 times the performance-per-watt of the Intel (INTC) dual-core Xeon processor, claims the company.

With that many cores, though, the chip needs to be energy efficient. Otherwise, the energy bill required to run the computer or electronics powered by the chip would probably cost more than the chip itself.