Here we discuss the current market environment, the competitive landscape with a focus on what current chips are being displaced by the multicore chips. SM: I read in the slides you sent me that you are expecting a TAM (Total Available Market) of $54 billion, is this based on the two markets we discussed –
3Com acquired US Robotics, and then USR started shrinking in the modem market, one of its primary franchises. In a royal nightmare that ensued, Eric lost the advantage that 3Com had built as part of its first turnaround. SM: Were there any positives which came out of this mess? EB: The only thing that came
Here we begin to examine the current market segments where the multicore processors are having a significant impact. The two major markets are networking and multimedia applications. SM: Coming back to where your applications are – complex networking applications, and multimedia, right? AA: I don’t know if you want to use the word complex, because
3Com challenged Cisco with a Boundary Router strategy that threatened Cisco’s core router franchise. SM: So what prevented you from finally catching Cisco and passing them? EB: In 1997, there was one major shock for 3Com. More and more enterprise networks had to extend into carrier networks. Enterprises could not build all of these large
SM: How much do people need to learn to be able to optimize programs on the Tilera chips? AA: That depends on the applications and the domain. The good news is you have gotten something working and running. Once you have done that, you can then try various optimizations. You don’t have to read 50
SM: Is this when you began to close the gap on Cisco? EB: There was one play that we used which enabled us to close in on Cisco, and we called it Boundary Routing. Cisco was driven to more complex solutions than us. They positioned routing as something of a magic art, very complicated and
One of the greatest challenges with Massively Parallel Computing is Programmability. Anant explains Tilera’s approach to software and tools in more detail, and his “gentle slope programming” concept. SM: You created all of the tools from scratch, or did you base them on existing tools? AA: We invented all of this, and it is very
SM: Did the market understand your positioning as an integrated networking solution? EB: I think they did. Of course we were coming from behind in routers, and we were behind SynOptics in hubs, and we were behind others in single categories. We started to strengthen our position in all our segments, and this helped because