
On-Chip Interconnection Architecture of the Tile Processor (2007) [pdf] - steven741
https://www.princeton.edu/~wentzlaf/documents/Wentzlaff.2007.IEEE_Micro.Tilera.pdf
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ernon
Ahh Tilera. When MIT's RAW architecture went commercial and became Tilera, it
looked like the multicore future was finally coming. They had a lot of nice
devtools, like an eclipse-based simulator that let you visualize what was
going on in the chip. 64 cores was really appealing, but because they didn't
have floating point in the first set of chips, people mainly used them for
network processing. Then.. Intel started talking about Larrabee (why use
Tilera when you could just run p54c x86), and Nvidia started to become more
programmable via Cuda.

Eventually EZChip acquired Tilera (2014), which was then acquired by Mellanox
(the hpc network company). Last I saw (2016), Mellanox was using trying to put
the tilera stuff in the BlueField products (NVMe over Fabrics target, I
think):

[https://www.hpcwire.com/2016/06/01/mellanox-spins-ezchip-
acq...](https://www.hpcwire.com/2016/06/01/mellanox-spins-ezchip-acquisition-
bluefield-silicon/)

Anyone know what happened with BlueField?

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senatorobama
You seem to know a lot. Any nice startups in this space?

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daniel-cussen
Greenarrays is still going. They've made some new app notes.

I've found the 64x18b word limitation of memory per computer much less
daunting than I did at the beginning, simply because how amazingly terse you
can make your code. You also end up just simplifying, making your look-up-
table or other array 8 or 16 words long...sometimes 32 or 64, but that's a bit
more work.

One experiment I've done with it is harnessing 95 simultaneous cores for a
virus vat, with a 47 core vat enclosure keeping it from hanging. The last 2
nodes are I/O and the probe to see what's going on. The virus is exactly one
18b word.

~~~
senatorobama
How about SiFive

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fallingfrog
This looks really similar to that adapteva chip a few years back..

[http://adapteva.com/docs/epiphany_arch_ref.pdf](http://adapteva.com/docs/epiphany_arch_ref.pdf)

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UncleEntity
Are those things even for sale anymore? Did a (quick) google search and found
one on e-bay and that's about it.

~~~
steven741
Sort of. Tilera got acquired EZchip Semiconductor who merged with Mellanox
Technologies. However, support for the TILE architecture isn't what it used to
be.

[http://www.mellanox.com/page/multi_core_overview?mtag=multi_...](http://www.mellanox.com/page/multi_core_overview?mtag=multi_core_overview)

~~~
jburgess777
The tile architecture was dropped from the Linux kernel in 4.17

[https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...](https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=bb9d812643d8a121df7d614a2b9c60193a92deb0)

