Tilera
| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Semiconductor |
| Founded | October 2004 |
| Founder | Anant Agarwal, Devesh Garg, Vijay K. Aggarwal |
| Defunct | 2014 |
| Fate | Acquired by EZchip Semiconductor |
| Headquarters | San Jose, California , United States |
Area served | Worldwide |
| Products | TILE64, TILEPro64, TILE-Gx series manycore processors |
Tilera Corporation was a fabless semiconductor firm focused on designing manycore embedded processors. Its product lineup included several processors such as the TILE64, TILEPro64, and the TILE-Gx series.
After a series of acquisitions, Tilera's intellectual property rights were obtained by Nvidia through the acquisitions of EZchip Semiconductor and Mellanox Technologies. Currently, Nvidia offers the BlueField product family, which is based on Tilera's original designs.
History
In 1990, Anant Agarwal led a team at MIT in creating scalable multiprocessor systems by utilizing single-chip processors. The Alewife project combined shared memory with message-passing techniques to enable communication between nodes.
In 1997, Agarwal launched the RAW project, supported by DARPA and NSF funding. This initiative produced a 16-processor multicore tile that showcased mesh interconnect technology alongside advanced compiler support.
Tilera was established in October 2004 by Agarwal, Devesh Garg, and Vijay K. Aggarwal. Its inaugural product, the 64-core TILE64 processor, was released in August 2007. The company secured over $100 million in funding from investors such as Bessemer Venture Partners, Walden International, Columbia Capital, VentureTech Alliance, Broadcom, Quanta Computer, and NTT. Headquartered in San Jose with research and development operations in Westborough, Massachusetts, Tilera also operated sales and support offices across China, Japan, and Europe.
In July 2014, EZchip Semiconductor acquired Tilera for $130 million. Subsequently, Mellanox Technologies purchased EZchip for $811 million. Mellanox then developed the BlueField series by integrating ARM cores with Tilera’s mesh interconnect technology before Nvidia acquired Mellanox in 2019 for $6.9 billion. As of 2024, Nvidia continues to market BlueField products.
Products
Tilera’s flagship offering was the Tile CPU family, characterized by a multicore architecture where cores communicated through a mesh network named iMesh. This design aimed to scale efficiently to hundreds of cores within a single chip. The objective was to deliver a high-performance yet energy-efficient CPU that provided greater adaptability compared to specialized processors like DSPs. In October 2009, Tilera launched the TILE-Gx series built on 40 nm process technology, featuring up to 72 cores running at 1.2 GHz along with models containing 9, 16, and 36 cores.
The TILE-Gx processors (introduced in October 2011) targeted several markets including:
- Cloud computing workloads such as web indexing, search engine operations, and cache acceleration servers
- Networking hardware encompassing intelligent routers, firewalls, test instruments, and forensic or data-mining tools
- Multimedia sectors including videoconferencing systems, broadcast video servers, and edge QAM devices
- Wireless infrastructure applications like 4G Node B base stations, radio network controllers, and media gateways
A 36-core model typically consumed approximately 35 watts under maximum load.
Support for the Tilera architecture was incorporated into Linux kernel version 2.6.36 in October 2010. Additionally, Tilera provided the Multicore Development Environment (MDE) software suite alongside development boards centered on Tile processors.
Networking software vendor 6WIND supplied high-performance packet-processing solutions optimized for the TilePro64 platform.
On July 25, 2011, Facebook disclosed that their testing demonstrated TilePro processors achieved threefold greater energy efficiency compared to Intel’s x86 processors.
In November 2012, MikroTik became the pioneer manufacturer to ship products powered by Tile-GX processors with its Cloud Core Router series.
By June 2018, official Linux kernel support for the Tilera architecture had been discontinued.
See also
External links
- Conversation with Anant Agarwal.
- Articles with short description
- 2004 establishments in Massachusetts
- 2014 disestablishments in Massachusetts
- 2014 mergers and acquisitions
- American companies established in 2004
- American companies disestablished in 2014
- Companies based in Massachusetts
- Computer companies established in 2004
- Computer companies disestablished in 2014
- Defunct computer companies of the United States
- Defunct computer hardware companies
- Electronics companies established in 2004
- Electronics companies disestablished in 2014
- Defunct semiconductor companies of the United States
- Manycore processors
- Parallel computing
- Reconfigurable computing