How many in-order cores could one fit on a die?

I'm not sure Java was its natural habitat either, given the GC issues. It was designed for fairly parallel (multi-thread/process) C/C++ server software - web, SQL, etc.

Tilera, worked on software on that too. The people who architected that software had actually done a pretty good job of making sure the packet processing "hot" paths could all run independently, and each thread (1:1 to CPU core) had its own copy of the data required to process packets. Other, non-forwarding-path "offline" code would then in the background take the per-CPU packet data, process it, figure out what needed to be updated, and update each per-CPU hot-path/packer-processing data state accordingly. That worked very well.

The issue the shop I worked at had with Tilera was that it was unreliable. The hardware had weird lock up bugs. I figured out ways to increase the MTBF of these hard lock ups, by taking more care in programming the broadcom Phys attached to the chip (I think they were on ASIC, and part of the Tilera design - can't quite remember). But... MAU programming via I2C controllers shouldn't really be causing catastrophic lockups of the whole chip. We still had hard lock ups though - never fully figured them all out or work-arounds.

It seemed a 'fragile' and sensitive chip.