Tilera's New Server Chips Arrive

Video streaming equipment maker Harmonic and embedded systems house Mercury Computing aren't so shy and confirm they are using the widgets, which are said to shatter performance and performance-per-watt benchmarks, making them a natural to replace conventional Intel systems in the cloud, networking and multimedia applications.

Tilera chips are not x86-compatible however they do run a Centos-derived Linux - Tilera is supported in the Linux kernel - and software isn't all that hard to recompile. So Tilera is shooting for what it calls the low-hanging fruit, the 10% of the data center given over to stuff like Memcached.

That's supposed to mean that clients can add more services into their networking infrastructure equipment, support more video capabilities in their media applications, and reduce the overall cost and power consumption of their data centers.

Tilera has collected $105 million in VC funding since it was started in 2004. It as well has earnings from its 90nm 32-bit line. It doesn't expect to have to go back for more, Doud said.

Eventually, Tilera is going to have to compete against ARM, which is moving into servers, which won't be x86 either, however Tilera figures it's got a two-year lead on both ARM itself, the ARM-based 32-bit server start-up Calxeda and Calxeda's new playmate HP. The giant server vendor has projected ARM servers being 15%-20% of the market in a few years yet so far all the ARM camp can promise are what Tilera calls wimpy nodes that don't act in a cache coherent manner.

The company as CEO to lead the charge to build it out

Tilera co-founder Devesh Garg has as well rejoined the company as CEO to lead the charge to build it out. He was CEO between 2004 and 2007 and at the time went to the Bessemer Venture Partners India fund for the past three years as a managing director, remaining active in Tilera as an investor and shareholder. He hails from a pre-IPO Broadcom, overseeing product development with executive management responsibilities for technical sales and field application engineering, accounting for more than $500 million in annual revenue.

Maureen O'Gara the most read innovation reporter for the past 20 years, is the Cloud Computing and Virtualization News Desk editor of SYS-CON Media. She is the publisher of famous "Billygrams" and the editor-in-chief of "Client/Server News" for more than a decade. One of the most respected research reporters in the business, Maureen can be reached by email at maureen(at)sys-con.com or paperboy(at)g2news.com, and by phone at 516 759-7025. Twitter: @MaureenOGara