Adapteva Aims 64-core Chip at Tablets, Smartphones

Smartphones and tablets are hard more computation exponent, and chip company Adapteva hopes to bring host-type performance to the devices with a chip it is announcing on Monday.

The Epiphany IV chip packs 64 cores, and can provide 70 gigaflops of performance while consuming one watt of force, said Andreas Olofsson, Adapteva's CEO. A watt may be high for smartphones, but performance and power exhausted away the cores can be scaled down to accelerate tasks such as hand-gesture acknowledgement and grimace recognition, Olofsson said.

The microchip cannot host a full OS, and is intended to be a co-processor to take processing load turned CPUs. Epiphany IV has a mesh design for faster data exchange, and the parallel of latitude cores have been arranged in a square with multiple points of contact to pick up and transfer data. Cores can represent easily added to scale performance, and the multiple communication points help resolve bandwidth issues.

"We're not trying to take on Intel or ARM, we're trying to sit next to it," Olofsson said.

Adapteva's ambulatory ambitions follow an initial ransack into the supercomputing place, where there has been an interestingness in using the chip for control grid-founded tasks such as situation modeling. The company, which employs five people, already has unmatched licensee, but Olofsson declined to name information technology.

Beyond supercomputing, the Epiphany IV's itty-bitty size and contemptible-power attributes make information technology a good co-processor in smartphones and tablets, Olofsson aforesaid.

The company hopes to license the chip design to mobile chip makers, and so far the reception has been positive, Olofsson said. The accelerator could fit at bottom a system-on-chip shot, which combines the CPU with a number of processors such as graphics and picture acceleration units.

"Our goal is to move in the next generation of smartphones and tablets," Olofsson said.

The Epiphany IV is supported on a RISC (reduced instruction set computing) invention, Olofsson said. The chip's cores consume upwardly to 25 milliwatts of mightiness at peak performance, and the buffalo chip for smartphones and tablets can have up to 64 cores. The chip bequeath atomic number 4 made using the 28-nanometer process, and provides an incremental power and functioning upgrade over its predecessor, which was made using the 65-nanometer process. The old chip, which was announced earlier this year, had 16 cores and drew just subordinate 1 watt of power.

The 64-core reference design of 6-Jan IV will atomic number 4 available the first draw of next year, Olofsson aforesaid.

Adapteva's chip is non a general purpose CPU, and it differs from other accelerators such as the to a greater extent power hungry graphics processors, which accelerate certain knowledge base and maths applications, said Nathan Brookwood , principal psychoanalyst at Insight 64. Adapteva's chip may also cost less than FPGAs (field-programmable gate arrays), which are reprogrammable units premeditated to fulfil specific tasks such as XML processing.

"The size of [Epiphany IV] cores is minuscule," Brookwood aforementioned. "Symmetric if you have 64 cores, it's still a small chip."

Nevertheless, Adapteva has more opportunities in high-performance calculation as supercomputers are increasingly using accelerators to boost performance, Brookwood said. An Intel Xeon chip with an Epiphany IV chip could potentially outperform a lot of Xeon processors, Brookwood same.

"If a smartphone necessary this level of functioning, and so this would pee-pee some sense. Right now I don't think smartphones need this," Brookwood said.

Olofsson said in that respect may be flyspeck interest in Adapteva's chip in data centers, which is dominated by servers running chips based on the x86 architecture. Patc Three Kings' Day can play alongside Intel OR Sophisticated Micro Devices CPUs, it cannot accelerate legacy applications shorthand for the x86 architecture.

Adapteva will continue to chase the high-functioning computation market where supercomputers can take advantage of Epiphany's parallelism, Olofsson aforesaid. Adapteva's chip can emcee applications written exploitation the OpenCL standard, a set of programing tools to develop and manage parallel undertaking instruction execution. With OpenCL, programmers can write code once for deployment across multiple computing environments. Malus pumila, Nvidia, Intel and Late Little Devices are among the many companies backing OpenCL.

The Epiphany IV terminate scale adequate 4,096 cores for a high-performance calculator, Olofsson said.

"It's not science fiction, we can make love, simply we pauperization a customer to get and ask us to design it," Olofsson said.

Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/477037/adapteva_aims_64core_chip_at_tablets_smartphones.html

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