Abstract:
Tendrils Compute, a British Cambridge startup, announced the completion of US$30 million in financing, led by Benchmark, with participation from Visionaries Club, the British Sovereign Artificial Intelligence Fund, FR8, Antimatter, Cloudberry VC, Conviction, Embassy Ventures and SV Angels. The company said the new board member is Jack Altman.
Tendrils hopes to challenge traditional CPU and GPU architectures and create a general-purpose processor that can scale to thousands of cores. The company believes that existing CPUs continue to overlay historical designs to be compatible with early single-core, sequential execution software, and mechanisms such as cache coherence protocols and out-of-order execution buffers make it difficult for the processor to continue to expand; it proposes to redesign the chip based on parallel computing.
The company's idea is based on "interaction nets", which attempts to allow a large number of small computing processes to run in parallel and reduce reliance on shared variable memory and linear instruction sequences. To match the new architecture, Tendrils is also developing the open source programming language Vine, with the goal of making software and hardware oriented to parallel-first processors from the beginning.
Tendrils said that its goal is to rebuild a general computing platform, but it has not yet announced the performance benchmarks or detailed hardware specifications of the physical chip. Therefore, whether the thousands-core architecture can meet expectations in actual applications and compete with existing CPUs and GPUs remains to be verified by subsequent products and tests.
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