Azul Systems introduces 48-core processor

Azul Systems based in Mountain View California has announced their Vega 2 processor which contains 48 64-bit cores. Fabricated by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) on a 90 nanometer process, the chip is meant to provide network attached processing power.

The Vega 2 has 812 million transistors. Processors can be stacked to give complete systems of up to 768 cores with 768 gigabytes of memory.

Azul currently sells their Azul Compute Appliance which combines up 384 cores to accelerate Java applications. The company claims that these appliances don’t have to be set up like traditional servers and can simply be plugged in to provide more processing power to the network.

Future Azul network attached processing servers will use the Vega 2 chip in 2007.