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Anant Agarwal
The Next Big Innovation in Microprocessors: Anant Agarwal (Part 9)
I am curious how Anant addresses the intellectual property strategy for Tilera. In the back of my mind is the story of Tessera, a company that has had fundamental innovations in chip scale packaging, and today every single manufacturer of miniaturized consumer devices violate their patent, and pay them royalties. Some of the innovations that
The Next Big Innovation in Microprocessors: Anant Agarwal (Part 8)
SM: The market you are pursuing is embedded processors, so you do not really have demand for the fatter operating systems, such as Windows Vista. AA: Right, that is not where we are, but if for some reason that became important to a customer it would be done. Each processor core is full featured, so
The Next Big Innovation in Microprocessors: Anant Agarwal (Part 7)
SM: This is a radical redesign, and it seems it should be advantageous in other areas as well, right? AA: True. The other beauty of the mesh is that not only does it solve the performance problem, it also really addresses the power problem. A bus is a big centralized structure, and any big centralized
The Next Big Innovation in Microprocessors: Anant Agarwal (Part 6)
Anant identified five significant areas where innovation had to occur for multicore processors to really take off. He addressed each of these areas. Here we discuss the interconnect bottleneck issues in further depth. SM: So you are doing some set of pre-routing on a switch. AA: Exactly. Now that you have a switch on each
The Next Big Innovation in Microprocessors: Anant Agarwal (Part 5)
Here we delve into a discussion of the differences between multiprocessor and multicore architectures. Multicore is when you put multiple processors on a single chip. But you still need to overcome bus bottlenecks. SM: So multicore does not use the traditional packaging? AA: Not really. In multiprocessors, for example, at Alewife we built a machine
The Next Big Innovation in Microprocessors: Anant Agarwal (Part 4)
SM: Did you get started because of pressure from the VC’s or did you feel the market was turning? AA: I thought the timing was right in 2004, so we formed the company in October of that year. What is interesting is when I go back and look at the time of our VCs presentations,
The Next Big Innovation in Microprocessors: Anant Agarwal (Part 3)
SM: What came after Alewife and VMW? AA: I did VMW in 1994 – 1995, and in 1996 I came back to MIT. I started the Raw effort in 1996. Looking at processor design, we felt that in another 10 years we would have chips with billions of transistors and we wanted to discover how
The Next Big Innovation in Microprocessors: Anant Agarwal (Part 2)
When I arrived at MIT in 1993, Anant was in the midst of his first startup, decidedly bitten by the entrepreneurship bug. The project I was on was Alewife, which Anant discusses below. Many of the ideas and breakthroughs in Tilera date back to the research we did during Alewife. At the time, I was
