Based out of Netanya, Israel Plurality has been working on multi-core designs since 2004. In 2007, the company offered a proof of concept chip that incorporated 16 32-bit RISC cores, and offered it to customers as an evaluation and development kit. Then, the company was supposed to follow this up with a 64-core 90nm commercial chip in Q3 of 2007. But unless I’ve missed the announcement, this commercial product seems to have never materialized. Maybe the company encountered some problems with the initial design, or maybe the 64 cores were simply a few too many to make the product cost effective in 90nm? - We will probably never find out.

Regardless, in February of this year Plurality announced that research has been completed on their HyperCore Architecture Line (HAL) of multi-core processors and hinted at an investment round that would finance the commercialization of a 256-core chip, now slated to hit the market some time in 2009. This round of financing occurred in July, and netted the company a nice $8m in funding. Other than the increased number of cores, not too much seems to have changed architecturally, at least on the high-level. The design still incorporates a hardware based synchronizer/scheduler that optimizes the load for each core, although the company hints at having filed several more patent applications which improve its performance. Additionally, the design continues to connect all the cores to a single shared memory, rather than allowing individual cores to have local caches.  Finally, the company is sticking by its task map programming model which requires the programmer to divide a particular algorithm into specific tasks that define dependencies. Plurality makes it sound as if this programming process is a piece of cake for a regular programmer, however, I would question whether a regular programmer can partition an algorithm efficiently into parallel tasks. Further, with this approach, quite a bit of work will be required to re-compile older programs for optimum performance - but that is generally the case anyhow. Optimally, Plurality should develop a compiler that would automatically generate a task map for their HyperCore processor; however, this has been tried many times before and is still very much the holy grail of parallel programming.