TILE64

TILE64[1] is a VLIW ISA multicore processor manufactured by Tilera. It consists of a mesh network of 64 "tiles", where each tile houses a general purpose processor, cache, and a non-blocking router, which the tile uses to communicate with the other tiles on the processor.

The short-pipeline, in-order, three-issue cores implement a MIPS-inspired[2] VLIW instruction set. Each core has a register file and three functional units: two integer arithmetic logic units and a load-store unit. Each of the cores ("tile") has its own L1 and L2 caches plus an overall virtual L3 cache which is an aggregate of all the L2 caches.[3] A core is able to run a full operating system on its own or multiple cores can be used to run a symmetrical multi-processing operating system.

TILE64 has four DDR2 controllers, two 10-gigabit Ethernet interfaces, two four-lane PCIe interfaces, and a "flexible" input/output interface, which can be software-configured to handle a number of protocols. The processor is fabricated using a 90 nm process and runs at speeds of 600 to 900 MHz.

Schematic of the TILE64 processor

Schematic of a TILE of the TILE64 processor

According to CTO and co-founder Anant Agarwal, Tilera will target the chip at networking equipment and digital video markets where the demands for computing processing are high.[4]

Support for the TILE64 architecture was added to Linux kernel version 2.6.36[5] but was dropped in kernel version 4.16.[6] A non-official LLVM back-end for Tilera exists.[7]