Tera Computer Corp is hoping to break even for the first time in nearly twelve years of operations with the adoption of the CMOS manufacturing process for its MultiThreaded Architecture (MTA) 64-bit processor. The Seattle, Washington-based company posted a loss of $6.7m for its second quarter, compared with a loss of $4.3m for the same period last year.
The CMOS MTA processors – which should be available in the first or second quarter next year – drastically reduce the size of the MTA processors, integrating a 24-chip circuit board onto a single piece of silicon. The company’s CEO, Jim Rottsolk, hopes that this will also enable Tera to cut the price of its chips. He says that typical high performance processors cost around $50,000 per processor including memory subsystems, the MTA processors cost around $400,000 per processor. We should close that gap over the next couple of years, Rottsolk says. However, even with the high processor costs, he claims that Tera systems offer a ten or twenty times performance hike over other systems and asks: what’s that worth? Tera is expecting to seal some major industrial contracts when it introduces the CMOS processors.
The 64-bit register MTA design features 128 registers. The processors are currently offered in an eight-way system, which will soon be scaled up to 16. Each processor can handle 3 operations per cycle and latency problems are dealt with in hardware. Rottsolk says that this means that each processor has a bandwidth of 200Mb per second, or 3.2Gbps in a full 8-way. The CMOS-based 16-way system is what the company hopes will be its savior. It needs to sell four a year to break even, according to Rottsolk. However, the company still has a lot of its older board MTA chips, which may well never get sold, a price worth paying according to Rottsolk. He doesn’t expect any major contracts this year, only updates to the University of San Diego’s system. á
