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Silicon Valley-based start-up Tilera announced on Monday a new 100-core server processor, planning to give Intel a run for its money. In a statement, Tilera said Tile Gx100 provides “ten times better compute efficiency compared to Intel's next-generation Westmere processors.”
The Gx100 is one of four new processors the company announced. Other members of the family will come with 16, 36 and 64 cores.
If Tilera’s new chips enjoy widespread adoption by server manufacturers, its effect on the data center may be significant in terms of power draw. Bob Doud, Tilera’s director of marketing, said that the 100-core chip will take up to 55 Watts at full performance, while the 16-core version will draw around 10 Watts.
For comparison, the least power-hungry chip in Intel’s Xeon 5500 family is the dual-core L5508, which at maximum performance draws 38 Watts. The rest of the processors in the series take between 60 Watts and 130 Watts – each chip on the lower end of that range carrying four cores.
While Tilera is not limiting its new series of processors to a narrow range of applications, its marketing will be targeted at few specific sectors of the IT industry.
“In the cloud space particularly, we’re not necessarily gunning after the generic server market,” Doud said. “We’re small and we need to focus our marketing and sales energy for now.”
Tilera’s initial marketing efforts are targeted at enterprise networking, cloud computing, multimedia and wireless infrastructure providers.
One of the first server manufacturers to adopt Tilera chips will be Taiwan-based Quanta Computer, which is also one of the San Jose, Calif.-based start-up’s investors. Quanta is currently working to integrate Tilera’s existing processors into its products but is also looking at the new-generation series.
Doud said first Quanta servers with Tilera chips will be on the market sometime next year. Talks were in progress with other manufacturers, but none wished to publicize their interest, he added.
The company will roll out first samples of the 36-core processor in the fourth quarter of 2010; the 16-core version about two months later; and the 100-core chip will become available for sampling in the first quarter of 2011.
Quanta contributed $10 million in Tilera’s third round of financing. Other investors are Bessemer Venture Partners, Columbia Capital, Walden International and TSMC. Besides having a financial stake in Tilera, TSMC – a large Taiwan-based semiconductor manufacturer – also makes Tilera chips.
Other investors participated in the third round of financing but their names have not yet been disclosed.
The first two rounds generated a total of $39 million and an additional $25 million was raised in round C, Doud said.
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Keywords: Tilera, Intel, AMD, server processor, multi-core processor, 100-core processor, data center, cloud computing | | 
