Tilera's Chip for the Cloud Computing Age

It's rare for a semiconductor company to promise a chip that will deliver 10 times the capacity of Intel's (INTC) best. That's the claim Silicon Valley startup Tilera is making about a chip it intends to unveil later this year. Tilera says its design, which will pack 100 microprocessors, or cores, onto a single thumbnail-size piece of silicon, will result in faster, energy-efficient computers capable of performing more tasks simultaneously. Intel's new Xeon chip has 10 cores.

Current chips, says Tilera Chief Executive Officer Omid Tahernia, haven't been able to keep pace with the requirements of giant server farms built by companies such as Google (GOOG) and Facebook. These data centers need to expand to handle growing e-mail, online video, and search traffic. Simply increasing the speed at which a processor handles instructions from software has its limits. That approach generates a lot of heat and requires expensive cooling systems. "Turning up the clock frequency has given us a great couple of decades, but it's run out of juice," says Tahernia, who joined the San Jose company in 2007 after a career at Motorola and Xilinx (XLNX). "For the first time, the semi industry is in the way of progress."