Tilera

Founded in 2004 by MIT professor Anant Agarwal, built on his RAW research project. Where an ordinary processor had a handful of cores, Tilera placed 64 of them (TILE64, 2007) in a grid linked by a "network-on-chip" rather than a shared bus — a foretaste of the mesh fabrics now found in both server CPUs and AI accelerators. The later TILE-Gx reached 72 cores and sold mainly into networking gear.

The company was bought by EZchip in 2014, which was in turn absorbed by Mellanox and finally Nvidia. The idea outlived the company that made it: putting the interconnect in a fabric on the die is standard today, but Tilera was early enough to be wrong about the timing.