Possible mining hardware based on RISC

[navimarin]

I have been following all kinds of hardware threads on this board for a while now.

All FPGA/ASIC threads where very interesting. I learned that cost per kW/h differs from 0.04$ to 0.25€ per users I have seen so far.
As I am more on the upper end of that scale, power efficient solutions are most welcome.

I would like to know what you think about this processor
http://tilera.com/products/processors/TILE64
or ready as card
http://tilera.com/products/platforms/TILEncore_cards

It is said to consume about 20W. I fear that, as no price tags are provided and the I/O ports seem to target premium application scenarios, it will be priced too high.

Still, is anybody familiar with this specifice processor or give a performance comparison?
It seems there are no dev boards available (at least not publicly).

At motherboard with a few of these cards would be fun, since they are programmable with standard C++.

[navimarin]

Some marketing stuff:

"Combining multiple C-programmable processor tiles with the iMesh multicore technology enables
the TILE64 processor to achieve the performance of a fixed function ASIC or FPGA in a powerful
software-programmable solution."

• 8 X 8 grid of identical, general purpose processor cores (tiles) this makes 64 cores I like that
• 700MHz - 866MHz operating frequency
• 15 - 22W @ 700MHz all cores running full application

I thought I read that it is based on RISC but can't find a reference at the moment.

[lame.duck]

you could ask the for an evalution version of theiy development software, and look how many instructions  are needed for a single Hash and  divide the  Clock rate ... and compare the number with ATI-GPU. As there are only few instructions that are run in a loop, there are no separate cores with  dedicated different instruction streams needed.

I would say, nice toy for a speed loving geek (yes there are serious applications for sure), but not the optimal solution for bitcoin mining.

[navimarin]

A geeky toy for sure. I already tried to obtain a dev board. Unfortunately they do not respond at all...

[koalana]

A geeky toy for sure. I already tried to obtain a dev board. Unfortunately they do not respond at all...

I'd really like to see a hash benchmark on the tilera, since they claim to be on the verge of a 1000 core chip

they have 32; 64 and 100 core chips as is now

[Silverpike]

I've already looked into this.  The speed estimates are very low for this device.

The CPU does not have any vector instructions (IIRC), so all arithmetic would have to be using standard integer instructions.  Consider also the low operating frequency (~800 MHz).  A comparable desktop CPU with no vector instructions does < 1MH/s, so this board will never exceed 64x1 MH/s.

I also should mention that Tilera is in bankruptcy, because GPU computing destroyed their business (for obvious reasons).  No person in their right mind would pay $500 for 64 MH.

[navimarin]

I got a reply from Tilera. They got hosted starting at 30k $. They offered to lower it to 13k As introductery. I think this Thing is more about I/O since they have 2x 10 gbps Ports and so on. 1024 cores Gould have been interesting though.

Cheers