LONDON - Adapteva Inc (Lexington, Mass), a small and leanfabless startup that has developed a series of multicore floating-pointprocessors, claims its latest device, a 28-nm 64-core processor is close tosampling.
The Epiphany architecture is designed to operate as anaccelerator for DSP tasks such as speech recognition and image processing. Thecompany has started out in specialized applications such as military,engineering services and financial markets, but is now looking to move intomobile applications.
In addition, according to Andreas Olofsson, the company'sfounder and CEO, the 28-nm device is Adapteva's fourth chip and the company isclose to breakeven on a quarterly basis, all on less than $2 million ofinvestment. The company has used Globalfoundries Inc (Milpitas, Calif) as itsfoundry to produce the 28-nm chip which clocks at 800-MHz.
With mask sets costing millions of dollars how is that possible?The answer is simple -- multiproject wafer (MPW) runs, which mean mask costsare divided amongst multiple foundry customers. Olofsson said that Adapteva hasdeliberately targeted low volume, high value applications where it can meetdemand from a small part of the area of a few wafers but for which the companycan charge up to $1,000 per chip.
The company has taken in $1 million in revenue since summerof 2011 when it was selling its 65-nm 16-core processor. "We're close tobreaking even on a quarterly basis," said Olofsson.
The fourth generation of the Epiphany multicore architectureIP is a 28-nm design with 64 independent RISC cores, each with 32-kbytes ofmemory on an 8.2 square millimeter die, which the company claims offers thehighest energy efficiency of any floating point processor to date, at 70GFLOPS/watt.
HPC tractionThe design taped out in August and chips are back from fab,said Olofsson, but they still need to packaged and tested. All being well thecompany will meet its goal of sampling chips to customers in the first quarterof 2012, he said.
Adapteva claims that CoreMark benchmarking data shows thatthe previously released Epiphany-III chip performs similarly to serverprocessors, such as Intel Xeon chips, while consuming less than 2 watts of peakpower. The Epiphany-IV chip will offer a fourfold performance improvement onCoreMark benchmarks at the same 2 watt power consumption.
"Adapteva's low-power, high-performance approach willtransform the mobile markets by enabling server-level computing local toportable devices such as smartphones and tablets," the company claimedwhen it announced the E64G4 chip.
The Epiphany architecture can be programmed entirely inC/C++ and allows multiple programs to run at the same time. One of the mainarchitectural innovations from Adapteva is a low-power patented network-on-chiparchitecture that, in the 64-core device, sustains 25-Gbytes per second localmemory bandwidth and 6.4-Gbytes per processor network bandwidth.
Applications include machine vision, speech recognition,software defined radio, radar, security, and medical diagnostics. Olofson saidthe company would be looking to produce additional specialized versions of the64-core device in the following quarters.
When asked what sort of additions Olofsson said: "We'regetting quite a lot of traction in the HPC [high-performance computing]community. So it could be things like a double-precision floating point arraywith additional memory."
This story was originally posted by EETimes.
