Tilera

Tilera Corporation was a semiconductor company known for its manycore processor technology based on the TILE architecture. The TILE approach embeds many lightweight cores on a single chip and connects them with a scalable network-on-chip called iMesh. This design aims to deliver high aggregate throughput and energy efficiency for parallel workloads such as networking, data processing, and storage acceleration. Tile cores are typically simple, designed for high thread counts, and run in-order with hardware multithreading to hide memory latency. The result is a processor capable of exploiting coarse-grained parallelism across dozens to hundreds of cores on a single die.

The TILE family included processors such as TILE64 and TILE-Gx, which offered configurations with multiple cores on one chip and integrated on-chip networks to facilitate fast inter-tile communication. These processors were intended for use in network appliances, high-throughput servers, edge devices, and other workloads that benefit from large-scale parallelism and predictable performance.

Tilera supported a software ecosystem that included a Linux-based operating environment, development tools, and libraries designed to map and optimize parallel workloads across many cores. The company provided compilers, runtime libraries, and programming models tuned for the tile-based architecture.

In 2014, Broadcom Limited announced an agreement to acquire Tilera for about 430 million dollars, with the acquisition closing in 2015. The Tilera product line was subsequently integrated into Broadcom, and the Tilera brand was eventually retired as the technology was folded into Broadcom’s broader product offerings. Tilera’s concepts remain cited in discussions of on-chip networks and manycore design.