FASTER: Tilera TILE64 Processor

The Tilera TILE64, a processor for embedded applications from Tilera Corp. (www.tilera.com), has been certified by Berkeley Design Technology, Inc. (BDTI; http://www.bdti.com/index.html), the independent benchmarking firm that deals with digital signal processors (DSPs), as having the highest performance on its BDTI Communications Benchmark, which is based on an orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) receiver. Running at 866 MHz, the TILE64 processor was able to process 15 channels of BDTI’s OFDM benchmark, which is said to be the highest number ever recorded for a processor. Or, looked at another way, it had up to 10X the performance of high-end DSPs. Tilera processors feature a new, distributed mesh architecture that it calls iMesh, which scales to hundreds of RISC-based cores on a single chip, which helps provide the kind of performance exhibited here.