Adapteva pushes massively multicore chip at smartphones
Architecture can scale up to 64 cores, and thousands in future, accelerating tasks such as image processing
Published: 3 May, 2011
READ MORE: Processor
Multicore processors are the order of the day in smartphones, but most commercial chips are confined to two cores, with plans to move to four. Innovations in massively multiprocessing architectures have been targeted at the base station or server end, as seen at Picochip and Calxeda. Now another start-up, Adapteva, aims to bring as many as 64 core to handsets and tablets.
In fact, the first commercial application for Adapteva's Epiphany chip is in image processing for radar, which is being targeted by its first announced customer, DSP board maker BittWare. The architecture could also be used in base stations and other equipment, and potentially the new 'microserver' systems addressed by Calxeda for cloud providers. But founder Andreas Olofsson, formerly an engineer at Analog Devices, really has his heart set on the smartphone segment.
Epiphany works as an accelerator for advanced DSP tasks such as speech recognition and image processing. The current implementation has 16 proprietary floating point cores in a 65nm chip, which boasts low power credentials that would be suited to handsets - delivering 50Gflops performance while consuming under one watt. The architecture also promises to be significantly cheaper than current high end DSP designs.
Adapteva was formed 18 months ago when Olofsson came up with his first prototype and won funding from BittWare. His next goal is to win a tier one chip vendor to take the architecture into the smartphone market. This will focus on the next generation, with 64 cores, though the design can scale up to thousands of floating point processor cores.
"By designing processor and network sub-components specifically for massive multicore processing and for low power embedded computing, Adapteva was able to remove much of the power inefficiency often seen in traditional microprocessors and networks," the company said. "The benefits of this technology are far reaching in healthcare, military and high performance computing applications - and on mobile computing devices, the impact is even more pronounced."
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