100-core processors coming in 2010

Fledgling processor company Tilera has announced that it expects to ship a 100-core processor next year.

The company hopes to reach this milestone by the end of the second quarter of 2010.

The TILE-Gx100 was dubbed a "remarkable technology achievement" by the company's chief executive Omid Tahernia in a statement.

The TILE-Gx chips will be available as 16, 36, 64 and 100-core chips, but it's unlikely we'll be seeing them anywhere near desktop systems: Tilera says the new chips will target enterprise-level hardware such as servers used for cloud computing.

The company claims the new chips will offer 10 times the efficiency of Intel's next-generation Westmere chips, and that power consumption of the 40nm parts will range between 10 and 55 watts. Top clock speed will be a modest 1.5GHz.

"Customers will be able to replace an entire board presently using a dozen or more chips with just one of our TILE-Gx processors, greatly simplifying the system architecture and resulting in reduced cost, power consumption, and PC board area," Tahernia said. "This is truly a remarkable technology achievement."

The 36-core version of the TILE-Gx will start sampling towards the end of this year. Tilera says the 64 and 100-core versions will roll out at some point in the first two quarters of 2010.