Tilera, a start-up based in San Jose, California, raised $45 million in new funding for its TILE family of many-core processors for cloud computing and communications. 
Tilera’s processors are based on its “iMesh” architecture that scales to hundreds of RISC-based cores on a single chip. Tilera has two product families: TILE64 processors and TILEPro processors, with its latest TILE-Gx family planned for early 2011.
The new funding was led by Artis Capital Management, that included investment from WestSummit Capital Management and Comerica Bank in addition to existing investors Walden International, Bessemer Venture Partners and Columbia Capital. Cisco Systems and Samsung Venture Investment Co. also participated, joining Tilera’s previous strategic investors: Broadcom, NTT Finance, VentureTech Alliance, and Quanta Computer.http://www.tilera.com
- Tilera was founded in 2004 to bring to market the MIT research of Dr. Anant Agarwal who first created the mesh-based multicore architecture in 1996. The “Raw” project received multi-million dollar DARPA and National Science Foundation grants and spawned the development of the first tiled multicore processor prototype and associated multicore software in 2002.
- In 2007, Tilera launched its first “TILE64” processor containing 64 full-featured, programmable cores, each capable of running Linux. The on-chip architecture is designed to scale to hundreds and even thousands of cores. Tilera claims 10X the performance and 30X the performance-per-watt of the Intel dual-core Xeon, and 40X the performance of the leading Texas Instruments DSP. At the time, the company said its initial target markets for the TILE64 processor included the embedded networking and digital multimedia markets. This could include switches and security appliances with the performance of up to 20 Gbps for L4-L7 services.
