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Tilera's chip isn't really comparable though: it's really just a big DSP, with an extremely limited memory access model more reminiscent of the Cell SPUs than an ordinary CPU. This, combined with a custom instruction set and the lack of decent caches and vector units let you get away with many more cores on much less silicon using much less power--albeit at a clear cost.


I think Tilera's cores are closer to MIPS than to DSPs. It's CPU-ish enough to run Linux and a LAMP stack. That's enough for most of us.


I'm pretty sure their memory access model permanently disqualifies their chips from being "normal CPUs".

You can run Linux on a TI OMAP DSP too.


OMAP isn't a DSP, it's a dual-core with an ARM on one side and a DSP on the other. I don't know of any port of Linux to an actual DSP.


The OMAP is not a DSP. It's an ARM coupled to a DSP thingie. Linux runs on the ARM side.


(As I said yesterday) Actually Tilera is better than Cell or this Intel chip because Tilera is cache-coherent SMP and runs regular Linux with pthreads.




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