Today many different interconnection topologies are used for multicore chips. For as few as eight cores direct bus connections can be made — cores taking turns using the same bus. MIT’s 36-core processors, on the other hand, are connected by an on-chip mesh network reminiscent of Intel’s 2007 Teraflop Research Chip — code-named Polaris — where direct connections were made to adjacent cores, with data intended for remote cores passed from core-to-core until reaching its destination. For its 50-core Xeon Phi, however, Intel settled instead on using multiple high-speed rings for data, address, and acknowledgement instead of a mesh.
via MIT Puts 36-Core Internet on a Chip | EE Times.
I commented some time back on a similar article on the same topic. It appears now the MIT research group has working silicon of the design. As mentioned in the pull-quote, the Xeon Phi (which has made some news in the Top 500 SuperComputer stories recently) is a massively multicore architecture but uses a different interconnect that Intel designed on their own. These stories as they appear get filed into the category of massively multicore or low power CPU developments. Most times the same CPUs add cores without significantly drawing more power and thus provide a net increase in compute ability. Tilera, Calxeda and yes even SeaMicro were all working along towards those ends. Either through mergers, or cutting of funding each one has seemed to trail off and not succeed at its original goal (massively multicore, low power designs). Also along the way Intel has done everything it can to dull and dent the novelty of the new designs by revising an Atom based or Celeron based CPU to provide much lower power at the scale of maybe 2 cores per CPU.
Like this chip MIT announced Tilera too was originally an MIT research product spun off of the University campus. Its principals were the PI and a research associate if I remember correctly. Now that MIT has the working silicon they’re going to benchmark and test and verify their design. The researchers will release the verilog hardware description of chip for anyone use, research or verify for themselves once they’ve completed their own study. It will be interesting to see how much of an incremental improvement this design provides, and possibly could be the launch of another Tilera style product out of MIT.
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