Here Anant discusses his final area of innovation in Tilera, which is the piece which really supports their go-to-market strategy and allows companies to become early adopters of multicore processors. SM: What is the final innovation? AA: The fifth and final innovation is in software. The third “P” is programmability. There, we have done some
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
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
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,
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
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
SM: Do you wish Raychem was around as an independent company today? PC: Yes, yes I do. SM: Why did you make the choices you did regarding Raychem? PC: I made the decision to retire at 66 because I believe the CEO has to be young and vigorous. When I retired I decided the best
I write this series with great pleasure, as my former graduate school advisor and renowned MIT professor Anant Agarwal unveils his so far stealth-mode company Tilera this week. Tilera could well be the next big breakthrough in processor design. SM: Anant, please give us some background on where you come from. AA: Growing up, I