Tilera expands TILE-Gx processor family with a 9-Core offering

In addition to the nine processor cores, the device integrates a high-performance memory controller, Ethernet and PCI Express interfaces, and available crypto and compression engines to reduce both system cost and circuit board area.

“We are seeing enormous market traction and design win activity with our 16 and 36-core TILE-Gx processors, unseating embedded processors and other difficult-to-program devices,” said Devesh Garg, president and CEO at Tilera. “Customers need unprecedented levels of performance and performance-per-watt to stay competitive and they simultaneously want to reuse their software and hardware investments across their product portfolio. The TILE-Gx9 brings all of Tilera’s advantages of performance, power-efficiency and thousands of open source libraries to our customers in an exceptional power envelope of only 10 watts.”

The TILE-Gx9 is ideally suited for compute and I/O-intensive applications including:

-10Gbps routers and firewall appliances
-Intrusion prevention and detection (IPS/IDS)
-Unified Threat Management (UTM) systems with 5Gbps
-Layer 7 Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) at 5Gbps
-Networked storage platforms
-Wireless access controllers
-Network monitoring with 100% line-rate packet capture at 10Gbps
-Streaming video server / content delivery networking offering 5Gbps HTTP streaming
-HD video conferencing with multi-channel h.264 1080p encode/decode

“Tilera’s power efficiency and overall scalability with a standard programming environment are important differentiators in the processor marketplace,” said Linley Gwennap, principal analyst at the Linley Group. “The TILE-Gx family offers advantages in aggregate performance and performance-per-watt over its competitors, driving increased adoption in the networking and multimedia markets.”

“We chose the TILE-Gx family because it allowed us to seamlessly leverage our software across a range of our product offerings,” said John Tully, CEO of MikroTik. “The TILE-Gx processor portfolio brings a great mix of compute, I/O, and acceleration while allowing us to showcase our unique router OS software advantages. MikroTik has been very pleased with the ease of use, accelerated time-to-market and overall scale that Tilera processors and their industry leading development software and development environment continues to offer us.”

“We offer a range of router solutions spanning from small office to very large enterprise,” said Wei Wen, executive VP of Maipu. “Tilera is the company that covers the broadest range of performance and price points with their TILE-Gx family. We can deploy the TILE-Gx9 in multiple products in our rapidly expanding portfolio.”

“Our network video recorder platforms lead the industry in flexibility and performance,” said Furong Yu, CEO of Nicetech. “The TILE-Gx9 has superior PCIe and networking stack performance that lets us maximize our disc I/O performance and the nine processor cores give us a powerful mix of video image processing as well as high-speed networking.”

TILE-Gx9 Technical Features

The TILE-Gx9, fabricated in a 40 nanometer process, integrates nine 64-bit processor cores along with a robust set of I/O ports and memory. The 3 x 3 array of powerful three-issue, 64-bit cores are connected through Tilera’s patented iMesh on-chip network that supports an advanced virtual memory system. Each core includes 32 kilobytes (KB) of L1 I-cache, 32 KB of L1 D-cache and 256 KB L2 cache, with 2.3 megabytes L3 coherent cache across the device. Maximum processor utilization is ensured with an on-board 72-bit DDR3 memory controller that supports up to 1600 Mt/s speeds and 64 GBytes total capacity.

Integrated I/O features include up to 12 ports of 1Gb Ethernet and 2 ports of 10Gb Ethernet, along with multiple PCI Express controllers that can be configured as either root complex or endpoints. An assortment of USB, RS-232, I2C and GPIO ports further consolidate the system peripherals into the TILE-Gx9 System-on-Chip (SoC).

As with other TILE-Gx family devices, the TILE-Gx9 includes the high-performance mPIPE (multicore Programmable Intelligent Packet Engine) system for wire-speed packet classification, load balancing and buffer management. This flexible, C-programmable engine handles up to 15 million packets-per-second of throughput for parsing multiple layers of packet encapsulation. Crypto and compression processing is accelerated through the optional on-chip Multicore iMesh Coprocessing Accelerator (MiCA) system delivering up to 10 gigabits per-second (Gbps) throughput.