The chips will be produced by Globalfoundries and delivers 70GFlops/W

Oct 5, 2011 19:31 GMT  ·  By

Chip startup Adapteva has just announced that it has taped out a 64-core processor based on the Epiphany multi-core architecture originally introduced in May of this year, which is capable of delivering a maximum of 100 Gigaflops of performance while using under 2 watts of power.

With THIS new chip, Adapteva targets both the supercomputing and mobile device market as the architecture has been optimized in order to deliver high floating point performance with a low power consumption.

At the heart of the Epiphany architecture stand 64 independent RISC cores with 32KB of local memory for explicit cache control.

These are connected together via a low latency mesh for inter-core communication which the company states that it can scale up to an impressive 4,096 cores per chip, to deliver in theory a massive 4 teraflops of computing power.

Right now, the current Epiphany-IV processor works at 800MHz and is expected to achieve 70 single precision gigaflops/watt, twice the efficiency of the company's previous design.

In the supercomputing market, the Adapteva processor will have to compete with GPGPU solution from AMD and Nvidia as well as with Intel's Knights Ferry MIC accelerator and a series of other FPGA floating point computing accelerators.

The Epiphany-IV will be fabricated by Globalfoundries using the advanced 28nm production node.

"With the launch of the Epiphany architecture in 28nm, we're able to bring even more computing power to a tiny footprint, without increased energy drain," said Andreas Olofsson, CEO of Adapteva.

"The Epiphany-IV platform demonstrates an immediate path to exceeding DARPA's 2018 goal of 50 GFLOPS/Watt in high performance computing applications," concluded the company's representative.

Adapteva will start sampling evaluation kits based on the Epiphany-IV 64-core in the first quarter of 2012. Until then, customers who want immediate platform access can use the 16-core Epiphany-III reference platform built using the 65nm production node.