These go up to 100
The chip side of the great mobile Internet land-grab is no less competitive than the devices and services markets that giants like Apple, Google and Microsoft are fighting over.
While Broadcom is strongly positioned in the wireless chip and low-power graphics markets, it doesn't have a flagship application processor to position against the likes of Qualcomm's Snapdragon, TI's OMAP or NVIDIA's Tegra.
Today, multicore processor company Tilera announced Broadcom has become a strategic investor and it has appointed Broadcom SVP Nariman Yousefi to its board of directors. And when we say multicore, we mean it; last October, Tilera launched the world's first 100 core processor.
It uses its own unique microarchitecture to allow cores to all communicate freely with each other, thus making performance directly proportional to core count. There's a diagram of the 100 core TILE-Gx processor below.
"Tilera's multicore processors are redefining the category," said Rajiv Ramaswami, EVP and GM of Broadcom's enterprise networking group. "Tilera offers an innovative multiprocessor approach for scalable performance and breakthrough power efficiency."
Also today, Broadcom announced it had acquired what shares it didn't already own in Teknovus - a supplier of Ethernet passive optical network (EPON) chipsets and software that allow delivery of HD video, high-speed data and voice applications over one line - for $123 million in cash.
