X

Chip start-up Tilera lands $45 million in funding

Tilera, a company that supplies many-core processors, says it has raised an additional $45 million in financing.

Brooke Crothers Former CNET contributor
Brooke Crothers writes about mobile computer systems, including laptops, tablets, smartphones: how they define the computing experience and the hardware that makes them tick. He has served as an editor at large at CNET News and a contributing reporter to The New York Times' Bits and Technology sections. His interest in things small began when living in Tokyo in a very small apartment for a very long time.
Brooke Crothers
2 min read

Tilera, a relatively young chip company, said today it has raised an additional $45 million in financing from tech heavyweights such as Samsung and Cisco Systems.

The San Jose, Calif.-based company, which designs many-core processors, received a new round of financing led by Artis Capital Management that includes new investment from WestSummit Capital Management, Comerica Bank, Cisco Systems, and Samsung Venture Investment. Existing investors include Walden International, Bessemer Venture Partners, Columbia Capital Broadcom, NTT Finance, VentureTech Alliance, and Quanta Computer.

The previous round of financing, announced back in March 2010, raised $25 million.

Founded in 2004, Tilera has made its mark by designing processors with up to 100 cores. Intel, by comparison, has high-end processors that top out at eight cores. As described previously by former CNET contributor Peter Glaskowsky, Tilera's design allows its cores to operate independently, theoretically allowing each core to run a different operating system. "More commonly, groups of tiles will be combined to run a single task that is part of a larger workload. In this way, one chip can operate like a cluster of multiprocessor systems," he wrote.

Samsung Ventures, as an example, is targeting cloud computing, network security, and wireless and multimedia applications, the company said.

"With many customers in production today, the company is operating near break-even and expects to reach profitability later this year. This $45 million round of funding provides a very strong balance sheet to take the company through a robust growth phase," the company said in a statement. Quanta, for instance, announced a server in June that packs up to 10,000 cores.