If you�re a chip start-up, one of the last things you want to do is draw the attention of Intel. It�s usually best to nibble around the areas Intel has ignored rather than waving a giant red cape, announcing your intent to take a stab at one of Intel�s main businesses. Intel tends to respond to such gestures with incredible force and has bested just about all up and comers.
And so, the chip start-up Tilera really put itself to the test this week by boasting that it has created the world�s first 100-core chip � a product capable of giving Intel a run for its money in the high-profit server chip market.
Tilera came to life in 2004 and grew out of chip research, much of it funded by the federal government�s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, done at M.I.T.
The company�s founders correctly forecast an era when chip makers would struggle to increase the raw speed of their chips � MHz and GHz � and instead need to focus on adding more cores to each chip to boost performance. To the Tilera founders, it made sense to create an altogether new chip design for this changing world rather than trying to adapt older designs to the multi-core model. Read more�
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