Tilera

Tilera Corporation was afabless semiconductor company focusing onmanycore embeddedprocessor design. The company shipped multiple processors in theTILE64,TILEPro64, andTILE-Gx lines.

Tilera Corporation

Industry	Semiconductor industry
Founded	October 2004; 20 years ago (2004-10)
Founder	Anant Agarwal, Devesh Garg, and Vijay K. Aggarwal
Defunct	July 2014 (2014-07)
Fate	Acquired byEZchip Semiconductor
Headquarters	San Jose, California , USA
Key people	Devesh Garg, President & CEO
Products	Central processing units
Owner	Privately funded
Website	www.tilera.com

After a series of company acquisitions, Tilera's intellectual property was eventually acquired byNvidia (viaEZChip, thenMellanox), which now shipsBlueField products that descend from the Tilera designs.^[1]^[2]

History

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In 1990,Anant Agarwal led a team of researchers atMassachusetts Institute of Technology to develop scalable multi-processor system built out of large numbers of single chip processors.Alewife machines integrated both shared memory and user-level message passing for inter-node communications.^[3]

In 1997, Agarwal proposed a follow-on project using a mesh technology to connectmultiple cores. The follow-on project, named RAW, commenced in 1997, and was supported byDARPA/NSF's funding of tens of millions, resulting in the first 16-processor tiles multicore and proving the mesh and compiler technology.

Tilera was founded in October 2004, by Agarwal, Devesh Garg, and Vijay K. Aggarwal. Tilera launched its first product, the 64-core TILE64 processor, in August 2007. Tilera raised more than $100 million in venture funding fromBessemer Venture Partners,Walden International, Columbia Capital and VentureTech Alliance, with strategic investments fromBroadcom,Quanta Computer andNTT. The company was headquartered in San Jose, California and operated a research and development facility in Westborough, Massachusetts, USA. It had Sales and Support Centers in Shenzhen China, Yokohama Japan, and Europe.

In July 2014, Tilera was acquired byEZchip Semiconductor, a company that develops high-performance multi-core network processors, for $130 million in cash.^[4] EZchip was later acquired byMellanox Technologies for $811 million.^[1] Mellanox developedBlueField, integratingARM cores with the mesh interconnect of TILE, but was acquired byNvidia in 2019 for $6.9 billion. Nvidia continues to ship BlueField products as of 2024.

Products

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Tilera's primary product family was the Tile CPU. Tile is a multicore design, with the cores communicating via a new mesh architecture, called iMesh, intended to scale to hundreds of cores on a single chip. The goal was to provide a high-performance CPU, with good power efficiency, and with greater flexibility than special-purpose processors such asDSPs. In October 2009, the company announced a new chip family TILE-Gx based on 40 nm technology that features up to 72 cores at 1.2 GHz. Other TILE-Gx family members include 9-, 16-, 36-core variants.

Their markets for this product announced in October 2011, included:

Cloud computing applications such asweb indexing,search engine and cache acceleration servers
Networking equipment including intelligentrouters,firewalls, network test equipment, and forensic /data-mining applications
Multimedia applications such asvideoconferencing, broadcastvideo servers, and edgeQAM systems
Wireless infrastructure such as 4GNode B Base Station,RNC, andmedia gateways

The 36-core general purpose CPU consumes approximately 35watts atfull load.

In October 2010, version 2.6.36 of the mainlineLinux kernel added support for the Tilera architecture.^[5]

Tilera also provided software development tools called the Multicore Development Environment (MDE) for Tile, and a line of boards built around the Tile processors.

The networking software company6WIND provided high-performance packet processing software for the TilePro64 platform.^[6]

On 25 July 2011, TilePro processor was found by Facebook to be three times more energy-efficient than Intel's x86, based on Facebook's experiments on servers using TilePro processor and Intel's x86.^[7]

In November 2012,MikroTik became the first manufacturer to ship devices based on the Tile-GX processors, the product line is called Cloud Core Router.^[8]

As of June 2018, theLinux kernel has dropped support for this architecture.^[9]^[10]