Tilera

Last updated
Tilera Corporation
Industry Semiconductor industry
FoundedOctober 2004;19 years ago (2004-10)
Founder Anant Agarwal, Devesh Garg, and Vijay K. Aggarwal
DefunctJuly 2014 (2014-07)
FateAcquired by EZchip Semiconductor
Headquarters
San Jose, California
,
USA
Key people
Devesh Garg, President & CEO
Products Central processing units
OwnerPrivately funded
Website www.tilera.com

Tilera Corporation was a fabless semiconductor company focusing on manycore embedded processor design. The company shipped multiple processors in the TILE64, TILEPro64, and TILE-Gx lines.

Contents

After a series of company acquisitions, Tilera's intellectual property was eventually acquired by Nvidia (via EZChip, then Mellanox), which now ships BlueField products that descend from the Tilera designs. [1] [2]

History

In 1990, Anant Agarwal led a team of researchers at Massachusetts 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 connect multiple cores. The follow-on project, named RAW, commenced in 1997, and was supported by DARPA/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 from Bessemer Venture Partners, Walden International, Columbia Capital and VentureTech Alliance, with strategic investments from Broadcom, Quanta Computer and NTT. 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 by EZchip Semiconductor, a company that develops high-performance multi-core network processors, for $130 million in cash. [4] EZchip was later acquired by Mellanox Technologies for $811 million. [1] Mellanox developed BlueField, integrating ARM cores with the mesh interconnect of TILE, but was acquired by Nvidia in 2019 for $6.9 billion. Nvidia continues to ship BlueField products as of 2024.

Products

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 as DSPs. 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:

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

In October 2010, version 2.6.36 of the mainline Linux 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 company 6WIND 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, the Linux kernel has dropped support for this architecture. [9] [10]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">VIA Technologies</span> Taiwanese Chipsets manufacturer

VIA Technologies, Inc. is a Taiwanese manufacturer of integrated circuits, mainly motherboard chipsets, CPUs, and memory. It was the world's largest independent manufacturer of motherboard chipsets. As a fabless semiconductor company, VIA conducts research and development of its chipsets in-house, then subcontracts the actual (silicon) manufacturing to third-party merchant foundries such as TSMC.

Open64 is a free, open-source, optimizing compiler for the Itanium and x86-64 microprocessor architectures. It derives from the SGI compilers for the MIPS R10000 processor, called MIPSPro. It was initially released in 2000 as GNU GPL software under the name Pro64. The following year, University of Delaware adopted the project and renamed the compiler to Open64. It now mostly serves as a research platform for compiler and computer architecture research groups. Open64 supports Fortran 77/95 and C/C++, as well as the shared memory programming model OpenMP. It can conduct high-quality interprocedural analysis, data-flow analysis, data dependence analysis, and array region analysis. Development has ceased, although other projects can use the project's source.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Multi-core processor</span> Microprocessor with more than one processing unit

A multi-core processor is a microprocessor on a single integrated circuit with two or more separate processing units, called cores, each of which reads and executes program instructions. The instructions are ordinary CPU instructions but the single processor can run instructions on separate cores at the same time, increasing overall speed for programs that support multithreading or other parallel computing techniques. Manufacturers typically integrate the cores onto a single integrated circuit die or onto multiple dies in a single chip package. The microprocessors currently used in almost all personal computers are multi-core.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Larrabee (microarchitecture)</span> Canceled Intel GPGPU chip

Larrabee is the codename for a cancelled GPGPU chip that Intel was developing separately from its current line of integrated graphics accelerators. It is named after either Mount Larrabee or Larrabee State Park in Whatcom County, Washington, near the town of Bellingham. The chip was to be released in 2010 as the core of a consumer 3D graphics card, but these plans were cancelled due to delays and disappointing early performance figures. The project to produce a GPU retail product directly from the Larrabee research project was terminated in May 2010 and its technology was passed on to the Xeon Phi. The Intel MIC multiprocessor architecture announced in 2010 inherited many design elements from the Larrabee project, but does not function as a graphics processing unit; the product is intended as a co-processor for high performance computing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">TILE64</span>

TILE64 is a VLIW ISA multicore processor manufactured by Tilera. It consists of a mesh network of 64 "tiles", where each tile houses a general purpose processor, cache, and a non-blocking router, which the tile uses to communicate with the other tiles on the processor.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Intel Atom</span> Microprocessor brand name by Intel

Intel Atom is a line of IA-32 and x86-64 instruction set ultra-low-voltage processors by Intel Corporation designed to reduce electric consumption and power dissipation in comparison with ordinary processors of the Intel Core series. Atom is mainly used in netbooks, nettops, embedded applications ranging from health care to advanced robotics, mobile Internet devices (MIDs) and phones. The line was originally designed in 45 nm complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS) technology and subsequent models, codenamed Cedar, used a 32 nm process.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anant Agarwal</span> Indian computer architecture researcher

Anant Agarwal is an Indian computer architecture researcher. He is a professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he led the development of Alewife, an early cache coherent multiprocessor, and also has served as director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He is the founder and CTO of Tilera, a fabless semiconductor company focusing on scalable multicore embedded processor design. He also serves as the CEO of edX, a joint partnership between MIT and Harvard University that offers free online learning.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mini PC</span> Low power, small and cheap computer meant for light tasks

A mini PC is a small-sized, inexpensive, low-power, legacy-free desktop computer designed for basic tasks such as web browsing, accessing web-based applications, document processing, and audio/video playback.

Manycore processors are special kinds of multi-core processors designed for a high degree of parallel processing, containing numerous simpler, independent processor cores. Manycore processors are used extensively in embedded computers and high-performance computing.

TILE-Gx was a VLIW ISA multicore processor family designed by Tilera. It consisted of a mesh network that was expected to scale up to 100 cores, but only 72-core variants actually shipped.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">TILEPro64</span>

TILEPro64 is a VLIW ISA multicore processor manufactured by Tilera. It consists of a cache-coherent mesh network of 64 "tiles", where each tile houses a general purpose processor, cache, and a non-blocking router, which the tile uses to communicate with the other tiles on the processor.

Tile processors for computer hardware, are multicore or manycore chips that contain one-dimensional, or more commonly, two-dimensional arrays of identical tiles. Each tile comprises a compute unit, caches and a switch. Tiles can be viewed as adding a switch to each core, where a core comprises a compute unit and caches.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mellanox Technologies</span> Israeli-American multinational supplier of computer networking products

Mellanox Technologies Ltd. was an Israeli-American multinational supplier of computer networking products based on InfiniBand and Ethernet technology. Mellanox offered adapters, switches, software, cables and silicon for markets including high-performance computing, data centers, cloud computing, computer data storage and financial services.

The Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) is an open source software project managed by the Linux Foundation. It provides a set of data plane libraries and network interface controller polling-mode drivers for offloading TCP packet processing from the operating system kernel to processes running in user space. This offloading achieves higher computing efficiency and higher packet throughput than is possible using the interrupt-driven processing provided in the kernel.

The OpenPOWER Foundation is a collaboration around Power ISA-based products initiated by IBM and announced as the "OpenPOWER Consortium" on August 6, 2013. IBM's focus is to open up technology surrounding their Power Architecture offerings, such as processor specifications, firmware, and software with a liberal license, and will be using a collaborative development model with their partners.

Heterogeneous computing refers to systems that use more than one kind of processor or core. These systems gain performance or energy efficiency not just by adding the same type of processors, but by adding dissimilar coprocessors, usually incorporating specialized processing capabilities to handle particular tasks.

A vision processing unit (VPU) is an emerging class of microprocessor; it is a specific type of AI accelerator, designed to accelerate machine vision tasks.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Zhaoxin</span> Chinese semiconductor chip manufacturer

Zhaoxin is a fabless semiconductor company, created in 2013 as a joint venture between VIA Technologies and the Shanghai Municipal Government. The company manufactures x86-compatible desktop and laptop CPUs. The term Zhàoxīn means million core. The processors are created mainly for the Chinese market: the venture is an attempt to reduce the Chinese dependence on foreign technology.

References

  1. 1 2 Trader, Tiffany (June 1, 2016). "Mellanox Spins EZchip/Tilera IP Into BlueField Networking Silicon". HPC Wire.
  2. "Nvidia outbids Intel to buy Israel's Mellanox in data centre push". Reuters. 19 March 2011. Retrieved 20 May 2023.
  3. "Tilera: About Us". Tilera Corporation. 2009. Retrieved 26 October 2009.
  4. "EZchip to Buy Tilera" . Retrieved 8 May 2024.
  5. "1.1. Tilera architecture support", Linux 2.6.36 Release Notes
  6. 6WIND announces availability of Tilare TilePro64 support 6wind.com
  7. Takahashi, Dean (25 July 2011). "Facebook study shows Tilera processors are four times more energy efficient". Venturebeat. Retrieved 25 July 2011.
  8. http://cloudcorerouter.com Cloud Core Router product page
  9. Linus Torvalds (2018-06-03). "Linux 4.17 Release Notes". lkml.org. Retrieved 2018-06-18.
  10. Arnd Bergmann (2018-03-09). "arch: remove tile port" . Retrieved 2021-04-06.