As of today, Tendrils has completed a $30M round led by Benchmark to rebuild general-purpose computing.
Contemporary CPUs are made under the constraint of backwards compatibility with sequential, single-core chips. Accumulated layers of historical designs are locking engineers into decisions dating back to the 1970s. As a result, all existing CPUs are bottlenecked by complex cache coherency protocols and elaborate reorder buffers. CPU scaling is sabotaged from the start. At Tendrils, we believe that the future of general-purpose computing lies beyond legacy architectures for legacy software.
Tendrils is answering the question: what if we redo the CPU? Instead of starting from a sequential design, we’re building our processor to have thousands of cores operating in parallel. This requires moving beyond the notion of shared mutable memory and linear instruction sequences. To make this possible, we’re working in tandem on the open-source language Vine, which has been designed from the beginning to target a new wave of parallel-first architectures.
