infoTECH Feature

May 03, 2011

Adapteva's Scalable IP Brings Unprecedented Parallel Processing to Multicore Computing

Semiconductor startup Adapteva has unwrapped a new microprocessor architecture intellectual property (IP) called Epiphany. The technology is unprecedented as it has the  ability to scale to thousands of parallel processors on a single chip, said Adapteva. Connected through a high-bandwidth on-chip network, each processor is capable of executing separate and independent programs, added the developer.

According to Adapteva, the high performance of the architecture is coupled with extremely low-power design and standard C programming model. Thus, bringing an unprecedented level of real-time processing performance to power constrained mobile devices like smartphones and tablet computers, stated Adapteva.

Adapteva claims that Epiphany architecture shatters all previous commercial multicore achievements. It has implemented a high performance version of the architecture, featuring 1,000 general-purpose floating point processor cores, an order of magnitude greater than any previously announced multicore device. 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.

Hence, added Adapteva, 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.

In a statement, Andreas Olofsson, CEO and founder of Adapteva said, “With the Epiphany multicore architecture, the application lag-time inherent in today’s mobile computing environment can become a thing of the past.”

He added, “‘Real-time’ will have a new meaning for complex mobile-computing capabilities that used to be restricted to the server, but can now be processed locally on the mobile device itself. Applications, from virtual content overlay, to face recognition, to real-time speech recognition, that will be feasible with our truly parallel computing environment, aren’t even envisioned as possible with the newly available quad-core devices.”

Similarly, Jeff Milrod, president and CEO of BittWare (News - Alert) commented, “Adapteva’s combination of C-programmability, ease-of-use, built-in floating point support, and unprecedented energy efficiency makes it an ideal accelerator for systems needing to augment existing FPGA-based signal chains with advanced floating-point algorithms.” 

“At BittWare, we saw the possibilities for the Adapteva technology advance from day one. This is why we chose to OEM Adapteva’s chips on our boards – with its unique capabilities; we will be able to leap far ahead of the competition,” noted Milrod.

Based on the Epiphany architecture, Adapteva has developed a silicon reference platform in 65 nm technology featuring 16 processor cores running at 1GHz and off-chip links with 8GB per second total bandwidth. Running the C-based CoreMark benchmark from EEMBC (News - Alert) at 1GHz, each one of the processor cores achieves an out-of-the-box benchmark score of 1288, demonstrating the ease-of-use of the Epiphany architecture, said Adapteva.

Furthermore, added Adapteva, the performance of the reference chip is even more impressive in executing floating-point math programs, where it demonstrates an energy efficiency of 35 GFLOPS per Watt. The company said that it offers a complete hardware development kit for evaluating the Epiphany architecture and silicon reference design. The kit features a full suite of multicore development tools including an ANSI-C compiler, cycle accurate multicore simulator, debugger, Integrated Development Environment and multicore run-time libraries.




Ashok Bindra is a veteran writer and editor with more than 25 years of editorial experience covering RF/wireless technologies, semiconductors and power electronics. To read more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Jennifer Russell
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