Cisco invests in cloud chip maker

Cisco has invested in Tilera, a developer of multicore processors for cloud computing and communications, as part of the chip maker's $45 million round announced this week.

Founded in 2004, Tilera makes general purpose multicore processors for networking, wireless, and multimedia infrastructure applications. Tilera's processors are based on the company's iMesh architecture, which is designed to scale to hundreds of RISC-based cores on a single chip.

It is not clear if Cisco will use the Tilera innovation or if its investment is simply that -- an investment. If it did use the research, the Tilera processors could emerge in a future generation of Cisco servers for data centers and cloud computing environments.

But Cisco has invested or acquired other chip companies through the years, like Celeno, which makes semiconductors for multimedia home networking; Procket Network, which made high-speed packet processors for routers; and CoreOptics, which makes digital signal processors for 100Gbps optical transport networks. The Procket innovation is at the core of Cisco's QuantumFlow processor, which debuted with the ASR 1000 router line in 2008 and is as well included in the new CRS-3 core router.