Adapteva Announces Epiphany Scalable IP for Real-Time Processing

Adapteva, a semiconductor technology startup, unveiled its flagship Epiphany microprocessor architecture IP (intellectual property).

The company’s technology has the ability to scale to thousands of parallel processors on a single chip. It can be connected through a high-bandwidth on-chip network with each processor capable of executing separate and independent programs.

The performance, coupled with Adapteva’s low-power design and standard C programming model, is expected to bring an unprecedented level of real-time processing.

The main benefit will be to performance- and power-constrained mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, as well as improving performance levels for other computing platforms.

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

“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,” Olofsson added.

The significance of the IP is that Adapteva enables the integration of a 64-core general-purpose processing engine into the silicon real estate of a typical smartphone System-On-Chip (SoC). Based on recent trends in multicore performance growth, Adapteva’s leap to 64-cores represents a change in the mobile marketplace that should not have occurred until 2016.

“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,” said Jeff Milrod, president and CEO of BittWare (News - Alert).

In 2009, Adapteva received the first round of institutional funding, a Series A commitment of $1.5 million. According to Olofsson, this amount should be the only funding the company needs.