Tilera to stuff 200 cores onto single chip

Hot pluggin'

The QS2 system boards are hot-pluggable too, which means you can yank one out and replace it without having to power down the entire box - something cloudy infrastructure users want very much. The Quanta SQ2 server design slides four of these modules into a 2U twin-style chassis, for a total of eight nodes. The chassis has two dozen 2.5-inch drive bays in the front of the unit, which can have SAS or SATA disk drives or solid state drives hot-plugged into them.

Here's a very grainy set of images of the Quanta SQ2 box:

Each Tile64Pro chip inside the SQ2 box burns between 35 and 50 watts running typical workloads, and running the open source Memcache-d caching program full-out burns 35 to 40 watts. (Web and data caching are one of the cloudy workloads that Quanta is targeting with this SQ2 machine.) The four-module box burns about 400 watts under heavy load, according to Bishara. (That does not include the draw from disks). With 512 cores in the box, the 2U server has 512 cores with an aggregate of 1.3 trillion integer operations per second of oomph and 176 Gb/sec of aggregate I/O bandwidth.

Bishara says that based on these feeds and speeds, a single Quanta SQ2 server can replace about eight dual-socket Xeon 5600-class servers running cloudy workloads. The Quanta QS2 design allows for 10,752 cores to be crammed into a single 42U rack, and burn less than 8 kilowatts of juice.

The Quanta SQ2 server will be available in limited quantities starting in September and will be generally available during the fourth quarter. Pricing for the box was not dilvulged.