Tilera, with new 64-core chip for networking, has $40M in backing
The Silicon Valley start-up Tilera has unveiled a powerful chip with 64 cores, or electronic brains that is getting widespread coverage today.
The Santa Clara, Calif. company’s product emerges after a decade of research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and improves performance by making use of a new way to connect its cores with a computer’s memory and improve the flow of data: It uses a mesh, or grid, of interconnected wires to line the cores to one another and in doing so avoids the traffic bottlenecks that can occur in multi-core processors.
The chips aren’t designed for PCs; rather they’re for video-processing hardware and networking devices. Tilera says it has about a dozen customers.
Tilera faces competition from Ambric, of Beaverton, Ore., which has a 344-processor chip based on a mesh design, and Stream Processors, of Sunnyvale, Calif., which has developed a chip with 80 specialized cores, called arithmetic logic units, arranged in 16 groups to allow data to move through the product at very high speed, Dow Jones notes (subscription required).
The company has raised $40 million from Bessemer Partners, Walden International and VTA, the venture arm of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. TSMC is manufacturing the chip.
A Mercury News story is here.
A CNET story is here.
Our past coverage of the company is here.
Next Story: Venture Vehicles, maker of high-priced electric scooter, gets backing
Previous Story: 3i Systems, LCD inspection company, raises $6.5M
About the Author, Matt Marshall
Matt launched VentureBeat in September of 2006, with the realization that no one else was covering the entrepreneurial and tech innovation scene with the velocity or depth that he was. Prior to founding VentureBeat, he covered venture capital for the San Jose Mercury News from 2001 to 2006. In 2002, Matt was awarded "Journalist of the Year" by the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists. Prior to working at the Merc, he was a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Bonn, Germany from 1995 to 1998, and a writer for the Washington Post in 1994. Matt holds a PhD in Government and an MA in German and European Studies from Georgetown University. In addition to VentureBeat, Matt is also the Executive Producer of DEMO, the leading launchpad event for emerging technologies.
