Adapteva
Encyclopedia
Adapteva is a fabless
semiconductor
company focusing on low power multicore microprocessor design. The company was the first company to announce a design with 1000 general-purpose microprocessors on a single chip. The company name is a combination of "adapt" and the Hebrew word "Teva" meaning nature. The name is a reflection of the company's key technology and business philosophy.
Adapteva's first commercial chip product started sampling to customers in early May 2011 and they soon thereafter announced the capability to put up to 4096 cores on a single chip.
The current version - Epiphany IV was announced in October 2011 and is has been taped-out at 28nm with 64-cores and will be generally available in January 2012.
tool chain. Each RISC processor 32 KB of local memory that can be accessed by the local processor or through any other processor within the memory space. The memory architecture is unusual in that it doesn't employ explicit hierarchy or hardware caches. The flat and unobstructed memory hierarchy allows cores to communicate with each other efficiently, reducing overhead in core-to-core communication. All processor nodes are connected through a Network-On-Chip.
The primary markets for the Epiphany multicore architecture include:
Fabless semiconductor company
A fabless semiconductor company specializes in the design and sale of hardware devices and semiconductor chips while outsourcing the fabrication or "fab" of the devices to a specialized manufacturer called a semiconductor foundry...
semiconductor
Semiconductor
A semiconductor is a material with electrical conductivity due to electron flow intermediate in magnitude between that of a conductor and an insulator. This means a conductivity roughly in the range of 103 to 10−8 siemens per centimeter...
company focusing on low power multicore microprocessor design. The company was the first company to announce a design with 1000 general-purpose microprocessors on a single chip. The company name is a combination of "adapt" and the Hebrew word "Teva" meaning nature. The name is a reflection of the company's key technology and business philosophy.
History
Adapteva was founded in March 2008 by Andreas Olofsson. The company was founded with the goal of bringing a 10x advancement in floating point processing energy efficiency for the mobile device market. By May 2009, Mr. Olofsson had taped out the first prototype based on a new type massively parallel multicore architecture. The initial prototype was implemented in 65nm and had 16 independent microprocessor cores. The initial prototypes enabled Adapteva to secure $1.5M in Series-A funding from BittWare, a COTS DSP company from Concord, New Hampshire in October 2009.Adapteva's first commercial chip product started sampling to customers in early May 2011 and they soon thereafter announced the capability to put up to 4096 cores on a single chip.
The current version - Epiphany IV was announced in October 2011 and is has been taped-out at 28nm with 64-cores and will be generally available in January 2012.
Products
Adapteva's main product family is the Epiphany scalable multi-core architecture. The Epiphany architecture consists of up to 4096 RISC microprocessors, all sharing a single flat memory space. Each RISC processor in the Epiphany architecture is superscalar floating point microprocessor operating up to 1 GHz and capable of 2 GFLOPS. Epiphany's RISC processors use a custom instruction set architecture (ISA), but are programmable in high level ANSI-C using a standard GNU-GCCGNU Compiler Collection
The GNU Compiler Collection is a compiler system produced by the GNU Project supporting various programming languages. GCC is a key component of the GNU toolchain...
tool chain. Each RISC processor 32 KB of local memory that can be accessed by the local processor or through any other processor within the memory space. The memory architecture is unusual in that it doesn't employ explicit hierarchy or hardware caches. The flat and unobstructed memory hierarchy allows cores to communicate with each other efficiently, reducing overhead in core-to-core communication. All processor nodes are connected through a Network-On-Chip.
The primary markets for the Epiphany multicore architecture include:
- SmartphoneSmartphoneA smartphone is a high-end mobile phone built on a mobile computing platform, with more advanced computing ability and connectivity than a contemporary feature phone. The first smartphones were devices that mainly combined the functions of a personal digital assistant and a mobile phone or camera...
applications such as real time facial recognition, speech recognitionSpeech recognitionSpeech recognition converts spoken words to text. The term "voice recognition" is sometimes used to refer to recognition systems that must be trained to a particular speaker—as is the case for most desktop recognition software...
, translationTranslationTranslation is the communication of the meaning of a source-language text by means of an equivalent target-language text. Whereas interpreting undoubtedly antedates writing, translation began only after the appearance of written literature; there exist partial translations of the Sumerian Epic of...
, and augmented realityAugmented realityAugmented reality is a live, direct or indirect, view of a physical, real-world environment whose elements are augmented by computer-generated sensory input such as sound, video, graphics or GPS data. It is related to a more general concept called mediated reality, in which a view of reality is...
. - Next generation supercomputerSupercomputerA supercomputer is a computer at the frontline of current processing capacity, particularly speed of calculation.Supercomputers are used for highly calculation-intensive tasks such as problems including quantum physics, weather forecasting, climate research, molecular modeling A supercomputer is a...
s requiring drastically better energy efficiency to allow systems to scale to exaflop computing levels. - Floating point acceleration in embedded systems based on field-programmable gate arrayField-programmable gate arrayA field-programmable gate array is an integrated circuit designed to be configured by the customer or designer after manufacturing—hence "field-programmable"...
architectures.
See also
- ARMARM architectureARM is a 32-bit reduced instruction set computer instruction set architecture developed by ARM Holdings. It was named the Advanced RISC Machine, and before that, the Acorn RISC Machine. The ARM architecture is the most widely used 32-bit ISA in numbers produced...
- CPUCentral processing unitThe central processing unit is the portion of a computer system that carries out the instructions of a computer program, to perform the basic arithmetical, logical, and input/output operations of the system. The CPU plays a role somewhat analogous to the brain in the computer. The term has been in...
- Advanced Micro DevicesAdvanced Micro DevicesAdvanced Micro Devices, Inc. or AMD is an American multinational semiconductor company based in Sunnyvale, California, that develops computer processors and related technologies for commercial and consumer markets...
- Multi-core
- Network On ChipNetwork On ChipNetwork-on-Chip or Network-on-a-Chip is an approach to designing the communication subsystem between IP cores in a System-on-a-Chip . NoCs can span synchronous and asynchronous clock domains or use unclocked asynchronous logic...