LONDON – Adapteva Inc. (Lexington, Mass.), a small and lean fabless startup that has developed a series of multicore floating-point processors, claims its latest device, a 28-nm 64-core processor is close to sampling.
The Epiphany architecture is designed to operate as an accelerator for DSP tasks such as speech recognition and image processing. The company has started out in specialized applications such as military, engineering services and financial markets, but is now looking to move into mobile applications.
In addition, according to Andreas Olofsson, the company's founder and CEO, the 28-nm device is Adapteva's fourth chip and the company is close to breakeven on a quarterly basis, all on less than $2 million of investment. The company has used Globalfoundries Inc. (Milpitas, Calif.) as its foundry 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 costs are divided amongst multiple foundry customers. Olofsson said that Adapteva has deliberately targeted low volume, high value applications where it can meet demand from a small part of the area of a few wafers but for which the company can charge up to $1,000 per chip.
The company has taken in $1 million in revenue since summer of 2011 when it was selling its 65-nm 16-core processor. "We're close to breaking even on a quarterly basis," said Olofsson.
The fourth generation of the Epiphany multicore architecture IP is a 28-nm design with 64 independent RISC cores, each with 32-kbytes of memory on an 8.2 square millimeter die, which the company claims offers the highest energy efficiency of any floating point processor to date, at 70 GFLOPS/watt.
HPC traction
The design taped out in August and chips are back from fab, said Olofsson, but they still need to packaged and tested. All being well the company will meet its goal of sampling chips to customers in the first quarter of 2012, he said.
Adapteva claims that CoreMark benchmarking data shows that the previously released Epiphany-III chip performs similarly to server processors, such as Intel Xeon chips, while consuming less than 2 watts of peak power. The Epiphany-IV chip will offer a fourfold performance improvement on CoreMark benchmarks at the same 2 watt power consumption
"Adapteva’s low-power, high-performance approach will transform the mobile markets by enabling server-level computing local to portable devices such as smartphones and tablets," the company claimed when it announced the E64G4 chip.
The Epiphany architecture can be programmed entirely in C/C++ and allows multiple programs to run at the same time. One of the main architectural innovations from Adapteva is a low-power patented network-on-chip architecture that, in the 64-core device, sustains 25-Gbytes per second local memory bandwidth and 6.4-Gbytes per processor network bandwidth.
Applications include machine vision, speech recognition, software defined radio, radar, security and medical diagnostics. Olofson said the company would be looking to produce additional specialized versions of the 64-core device in the following quarters.
When asked what sort of additions Olofsson said: "We're getting quite a lot of traction in the HPC [high-performance computing] community. So it could be things like a double-precision floating point array with additional memory."
