Multicore chip maker Tilera raises $25M

Chip maker Tilera, whose multicore products have as many as 100 computing “brains” on one chip, today announced it’s closed a $25 million third round of financing.

New investors in this latest, oversubscribed, round are communications chip maker Broadcom, contract manufacturer Quanta Computer and Japan-based NTT Financing Corp. This brings the total amount of venture capital in the six year old, San Jose, Calif.-based company to $64 million.

Tilera’s TILE family of products includes the TILE64 and TILEPro lines. The TILE-Gx line, due out later this year, is the world’s first 100-core processor, the company said. Tilera’s processors are based on its iMesh architecture that scales to hundreds of RISC-based cores on a single chip.

When we wrote about the introduction of the TILE-Gx last fall, we noted that the new chip will have 10 times the performance per watt consumed as Intel’s fastest Nehalem-class server microprocessors. Since it’s difficult for programmers to write software that can keep all the cores busy, the current Intel chips max out at eight cores and many computer scientists say core efficiency maxes out at 32.

But Tilera has come up with a unique programming model with tools that make the process of creating software to run on Tilera’s chips much easier, such as an ANSI C/C++ compiler, GNU tools and the open source Eclipse integrated development environment.

The TILE 64 and TILE Pro products are shipping to customers in the networking, wireless infrastructure, communications and cloud computing markets.

Tilera also announced today that Nariman Yousefi, senior vice president of infrastructure technologies at Broadcom, will take a seat on Tilera’s board.

Tilera said it’ll invest the proceeds of this final VC round into broadening its product portfolio and for the expansion of sales activities.

“We have grown revenues, design wins, and market momentum in one of the toughest years the industry has seen,” said Omid Tahernia, CEO of Tilera, in a prepared statement. “The closure of this investment round is another sign of Tilera’s growing success.”