adapteva
adapteva is a fabless semiconductor company focusing on low power multi - core microprocessor design. adapteva' s headquarters is located in lexington, massachusetts. for every employee, adapteva generates $ 195. 4k in revenue. adapteva has received a total of $ 5. 4m in funding. adapteva' s main competitors are atira, innovative integration and transwitch. adapteva has 10 followers on owler .
hi everyone, this is a long overdue adapteva status update. as many of you know, i left adapteva in j ...
owler has collected 14 screenshots of adapteva' s website since may 2014. the latest adapteva website design screenshot was captured in sep 2017 .
since adapteva was founded in 2008, it has participated in 3 rounds of funding. in total adapteva has raised $ 5. 4m. adapteva' s last funding round was on dec 2013 for a total of $ 3. 6m
transwitch is adapteva' s # 3 rival. transwitch was founded in null in shelton, connecticut. transwitch generates $ 8. 5m more revenue than adapteva .
atira is the biggest rival of adapteva. atira was founded in null, and its headquarters is in sunnyvale, california. atira has 94 more employees than adapteva .
adapteva is a fabless semiconductor company focusing on low power multi - core microprocessor designs .
parallella - 16 boards - adapteva inc. - mcu | online catalog | digikey electronics
adapteva is a fabless semiconductor company focusing on low power multi - core microprocessor design. adapteva was founded in 2008. adapteva' s headquarters is located in lexington, massachusetts, usa 02420. it has raised 5. 4m in 3 rounds. the latest rou ...
back in september 2012, massachusetts - based adapteva launched a crowdfunding campaign on kickstarter ...
innovative integration has been one of adapteva' s top competitors. innovative integration is a private company that was founded in camarillo, california in 1988. innovative integration has 94 more employees vs. adapteva .
andreas olofsson, founder at adapteva introduces the parallella open computing project. for more information, visit urltoken
adapteva claims it will have enough juice to outperform some of the latest gaming and server processors .
epiphany - v: adapteva arbeitet an einem 1. 024 - kern - prozessor - urltoken [ german ]
@ adapteva alright. i upped to 770 $. i hope it helps get this project funded 43 hours .
andreas olofsson, founder at adapteva introduces the parallella open computing project. for more information, visit urltoken show less
the latest mega - chip is a 1, 024 - core processor called epiphany v, which was announced by adapteva on wednesday. adapteva claims it will have enough juice to outperform some of the latest gaming and server processors .
adapteva has employees and is the third highest among it' s top 10 competitors. the top 10 competitors average 69 .
we are pleased to announce our latest project at adapteva simply called
the brain
. this new disrupt ...
based on the epiphany multicore chips developed by adapteva, parallella platform is an affordable open source, energy efficient, higher performance computer .
andreas olofsson is the founder of adapteva and the creator of the epiphany architecture and parallella open source computing project. follow andreas on twitter
adapteva' s revenue is the second highest among it' s top 10 competitors. the top 10 competitors average $ 2. 3m .
adapteva shows off what the parallella platform could do for the tv in the living room. for more information about the parallella board, visit urltoken
adapteva, inc. is a privately held semiconductor technology company based in lexington, massachusetts, founded in 2008. adapteva has developed the world' s most energy efficient multicore microprocessor architecture, immediately boosting by an order of magnitude the number of cores that can be integrated on a single chip. adapteva' s breakthrough architecture will have an immediate impact in a wide range of end user products from compact mobile devices to next generation supercomputers .
( gigaom): chip startup adapteva just raised $ 3. 6 million in series b funding from ericsson and carmel ventures, but there’s no ...
a 1024 - core 70gflop / w floating point manycore microprocessor, by adapteva. this is another whitepaper i was sent that i don’t have a link to .
( dibase): in early may 2014 i finally received from adapteva [ 1 ] my parallella kickstarter project [ 2 ] mini - cluster reward of 4 ...
the epiphany v chip isn’t designed for gaming—it’s aimed more at real - time image processing, autonomous driving, and machine learning, said andreas olofsson, founder of adapteva .
- adapteva, inc. is a privately held semiconductor company that has developed the world' s most energy efficient and scalable multicore processor chip, designed for parallel computing .
adapteva is turning to kickstarter for their parallella computer to get the funding to take their epiphany multicore daughterboard and shrink it down into a single chip. once that’s complete, adapteva will start shipping an arm - powered linux supercomputer that’s about the size of a credit card, or a raspberry pi under the new system of dev board measurements .
adapteva should have asked, and been able to answer those questions, before embarking on this project; and especially before seeking kickstarter funding. so what is their answer ?
=) @ adapteva similar ads were available for p4 at the time. hw may have the characteristcs of a great machine, but sw' s what makes it useful
now i come to the hard part of this post, and it’s hard because adapteva has a great story. linely gwenapp at mpr reports that the epiphany line was essentially designed by a single engineer, andreas olofsson, who spent his life savings to fund the first prototype. adapteva later raised $ 2 million, and has now scored its first customer in the dsp space. so my hat is off to olofsson and adapteva, because this is amazing work from such a small team facing such long odds. but to say that adapteva faces an uphill battle in breaking out of the application - specific dsp niche (e. g. , medical devices, military applications) is an understatement .
i also hope that this will position adapteva to move toward a second generation product based on the zynq 7015 (which in most respects is more advanced than the 7020) .
adapteva’s groundbreaking epiphany multicore architecture represents a new class of massively parallel computer architectures that is the future of computing and will disrupt a wide range of end markets from compact low power devices to next generation supercomputers. to enable parallel programming in heterogeneous environments, adapteva is adopting an open source approach making the architecture, interface and programming information available to all .
adapteva, inc. is a privately held computer manufacturer based in lexington, massachusetts founded in 2008. the company is creating a computing platform for future intelligent and autonomous machines .
adapteva' s groundbreaking epiphany multicore architecture represents a new class of massively parallel computer architectures that is the future of computing and will disrupt a wide range of end markets from compact low power devices to next generation supercomputers. to enable parallel programming in heterogeneous environments, adapteva is adopting an open source approach making the architecture, interface and programming information available to all .
adapteva: more flops, less watts, by linley gwennap. gwennap’s full paper is only available at mpronline. com, but olofsson was kind enough to email me a copy .
@ lulin if we don' t reach $ 750k, all of this effort will have been wasted and adapteva gets $ 0. that' s not going to happen though! : d
the adapteva team has a lot of experience in delivering complicated projects on time within specifications and our development risk is reduced by having long standing relationships in place with first rate suppliers and manufacturers .
the results are impressive, both on paper and in adapteva’s prototype. the company’s 16 - core design gets 19 gflops on just 270mw on a 28nm process, and adapteva is claiming 70 glfops / watt for its new 64 - core design. but the price for this impressive gflops / watt ratio, which bests even an embedded gpu, is a massive increase in programing complexity .
the epiphany v chip isn' t designed for gaming - - it' s aimed more at real - time image processing, autonomous driving, and machine learning, said andreas olofsson, founder of adapteva .
adapteva is the sponsor of the parallella project and the designer of the parallella board. the parallella project is a community driven project dedicated to the promotion and progress of parallel processing and the use of the epiphany architecture .
adapteva was founded in february 2008, and as olofsson, which designed digital signal processors at analog devices for a decade, jokingly explained to el reg ,
i got the risc memo from 1980 and i paid attention .
congrats to everyone at adapteva. i remember talking to a couple of researchers who were using the prototype 64 core epiphany processor who seemed excited at how it could scale. i wonder how excited they' d be about this .
adapteva, with its laser focus on floating point performance and with no allegiance to either the x86 instruction set or graphics support, is able to squeeze a lot more performance per watt out of its design .
michael feldman, hpcwire
we' re going to build a community around parallel computing ,
andreas olofsson, ceo and co - founder of adapteva, tells el reg .
it will be kind of like the raspberry pi, but with real performance .
the single - board adapteva parallella is a high performance computer designed for massively parallel systems. in this sense, it is a “raspberry pi for supercomputing. ” chm’s parallella is the first version of the computer, which is outfitted with a 16 - core, adapteva - developed epiphany microprocessor. the project was launched with a kickstarter campaign that ultimately netted close to $ 900, 000. a pledge of $ 99 or more was needed to receive one of the boards, which came loaded with the software necessary for owners to design their own projects. the parallella computing platform is open - source and all technical documentation was published on the web when the project was funded. the donor of this artifact is the founder of adapteva, inc .
the parallella computer is a high performance, credit card sized computer based on the epiphany multi - core chips from adapteva. the parallella can be used as a standalone computer, an embedded device or as a component in a scaled out parallel server cluster .
the top 10 competitors in adapteva' s competitive set are atira, innovative integration, transwitch, accelize, hitech global, altera, ketronixs, 4dsp, first contact engineering and first contact engineering. together they have raised over 0 between their estimated 519 employees .
but the problem that adapteva is chasing is much larger than providing cheap parallel computing for hobbyists. the company wants to be at the forefront of exascale computing, and to do so by providing the cheapest and most energy - efficient floating point operations on the planet .
the 1, 024 - core chip will not be available off the shelf, but adapteva will work with partners to commercialize the chip, olofsson said. that process, in itself, could be a challenge considering a lot of time is required to test and validate chips .
feature adapteva, an upstart risc processor and co - processor designer that has tried to break into the big - time with its epiphany chips for the past several years, is sick and tired of the old way of trying to get design wins to fund its future development .
upstart risc processor and coprocessor designer adapteva is shipping the first of its parallella system boards, which its epiphany multicore processors with arm processors to create a spunky and reasonably peppy hybrid compute engine that doesn' t cost much and is very energy efficient for certain kinds of processing .
“visual computing can enable gesture - based gaming, advanced user interfaces, augmented reality, and even improved health and safety. visual processing, however, requires many more flops than voice processing. adapteva’s architecture can deliver the performance required for visual computing. ” linley gwennap, industry analyst
@ adapteva, sorry, i missed your response. yes, that works great for me! ! in fact i' ve already upped the pledge to the $ 1500 one (right about $ 749k when i hit the button, but somebody beat me to it. : - )
“adapteva’s epiphany processor demonstrates how a small number of well designed instructions can work efficiently with gcc, making it the next generation of risc architecture. the epiphany architecture clearly shows that it’s possible to get outstanding compiler performance without a complex instruction set. ” — jeremy bennett, ceo, embecosm
book: receive a book
an introduction to parallel programming
written by the adapteva team. the book will be provided in pdf form and will include source code examples of parallel programs that use opencl, openmp, erlang, and mpi. (add $ 25 to any reward tier )
adapteva has released epiphany chips previously, and also shipped the us $ 99 parallella board computer with a previous epiphany chip. the company turned to kickstarter for funding to develop the board and shipped more than 10, 000 units. olofsson didn’t detail how he’d commercialize the new epiphany v chip .
side - note: adapteva - your work is fascinating, so much so that i read your entire set of ref docs for the epiphany. i' m in the boston area, let me buy y' all a coffee at diesel as i' d love to pick you brains .
i’m sure this was a hard decision, but i believe it is the right one: adapteva needs to be profitable in order to bring 64, 1024 and larger core models to market. i also applaud the decision to separate into the three models, maintaining an entry point accessible to students .
hi, i think there a lot of us who are very keen to see the 64 core board become a reality. perhaps another kickstarter campaign to get the project up and running again. 64 cores for a few hundred dollars would truly be the revolution many of us have hoped for from adapteva .
adapteva, how do you plan to be 2x as efficient per mm * * 2 than nvidia? those guys are not fools and i doubt they want to be wasting silicon, and they get an efficiency win (in the simd parallelizeable case) by not having all those separate instruction decoders, etc .
hi adapteva. could you add sata power and data connectors to connect a ssd like the cubieboard? and would be great that it could boot up from that ssd, instead from the slow sd card. its so sad that you improve so much the architecture just to create a bottleneck with the sd card .
the parallella platform is based on the epiphany multicore chips developed by adapteva over the last 4 years and field tested since may 2011. the epiphany chips consists of a scalable array of simple risc processors programmable in c / c + + connected together with a fast on chip network within a single shared memory architecture .
( thinq _): while chip giants arm, intel, and amd battle for control of your smartphones and pcs, a small company in massachusetts called adapteva is starting a revolution: many - core processors that offer a significant performance boost over anything currently on the market. we chat to its founder andreas olofsson to find out what’s going on. initially, it’s easy to dismiss adapteva’s chances of success as slim to none: in markets where a single processor architecture holds overwhelming dominance, such as x86 in mainstream computing and arm in the world of smartphones, olofsson has decided to develop an entirely new architecture. full article
early - access: you will receive a special beta version of the parallella platform 3 months before the general developer board release and immediate access to the platform sdk. you also get direct access to the adapteva support team. you will also receive one of the first 64 epiphany - iii based parallella boards once finalized .
“visual computing can enable gesture - based gaming, advanced user interfaces, augmented reality, and even improved health and safety. visual processing, however, requires many more flops than voice processing. adapteva’s architecture can deliver the performance required for visual computing. ” — linley gwennap. principal analyst and founder, the linley group
@ adapteva and dave. i agree. i pledged for the mini - cloud originally at 450 $ but i would really prefer the 2x mini with the new boards. if you can propose a pledge price for this i will up my offer. $ 1500 sounds fair from dave' s maths. do you agree? thanks
it will take about twelve weeks to fulfill those orders because adapteva is not pre - manufacturing boards. that will cost you $ 99, just like the base level of the kickstarter support did. you will eventually be able to order the zync chip with the fatter fpga, but pricing is not yet set for this upgrade .
“the potential for major returns in energy efficiency and performance gained from parallel processing are clear, and in fact critical, to support rapid growth in the telecoms industry. this makes innovations such as adapteva’s very exciting for ericsson and for the customers we work with, ” –sebastian tolstoy, ericsson vp business development, pa radio, bnet
the increased availability of modern embedded many - core architectures supporting floating - point operations in hardware makes them interesting targets in traditional high performance computing areas as well. in this paper, the lattice boltzmann method (lbm) from the domain of computational fluid dynamics (cfd) is evaluated on adapteva' s epiphany many - core architecture .
> adapteva, how do you plan to be 2x as efficient > per mm * * 2 than nvidia? those guys are not > fools and i doubt they want to be wasting > silicon, and they get an efficiency win (in the > simd > parallelizeable case) by not having all > those separate instruction decoders, etc .
“we firmly believe in early engagement to enable our customers to deliver innovative products with industry - leading performance and energy - efficiency. our close collaboration with adapteva is helping them bring a whole new class of multicore microprocessors to market on the foundry industry’s only production - proven hkmg technology. ” — mike noonen, executive vp of worldwide marketing, globalfoundries
if you want to buy a parallella - 16 board and you did not participate in the kickstarter program, you can get one from the online store that adapteva has set up, but you will get a zync - 7010 processor instead, which has only 29, 000 logic cells and 80 dsp slices on the fpga side of the xilinx chip .
it is not cheap to design and fab coprocessors or to make system boards that make use of them, so adapteva' s cofounder and ceo andreas olofsson fired up a project on fund - raising site kickstarter last fall to raise the money to fab the chips, instead of going the traditional route of raising venture funding and trying to get design wins .
the epiphany - iii chip is implemented in a 65 nanometer process and sports 16 cores, and the epiphany - iv is implemented in a 28nm process and offers 64 cores. this latter chip delivers about 102 gigaflops of performance at 2 watts, or 51 gigaflops per watt. (adapteva has chosen globalfoundries as its wafer baker, by the way. )
the parallella computer platform is an open source, energy efficient, high performance, credit - card - sized computer based on the epiphany multicore chips from adapteva. this affordable platform is designed for developing and implementing high performance, parallel processing. applications developed to take advantage of the on - board epiphany parallel processor can achieve unprecedented performance at the lowest power in the industry .
“it seems like our industry has not demonstrated much creativity in the past few years, and processing improvements have only come at the expense of increasingly ridiculous power consumption, which has in turn created burdensome cooling problems. we believe that adapteva’s epiphany architecture represents a flash of brilliance that reintroduces some much needed creativity into the embedded signal processing world” — jeff milrod, ceo, bittware
student reward: you get everything in the supporter reward and receive a black t - shirt with a parallella slogan on it' and' the book
an introduction to parallel programming
to be written by the adapteva team. the book will be provided in pdf form and will include source code examples of parallel programs that use opencl, openmp, erlang, and mpi .
you crew are amazing, genuinely awesome people. thank you for listening to the community and coming up with a solution that no longer requires a fan and the microserver edition. i’m sure most of us will understand that it’s not always feasible to sell at a particular price point and won’t begrudge adapteva doing what it can to stay afloat while trying to revolutionise computing like you are .
your crew are amazing, genuinely awesome people. thank you for listening to the community and coming up with a solution that no longer requires a fan and the microserver edition. i’m sure most of us will understand that it’s not always feasible to sell at a particular price point and won’t begrudge adapteva doing what it can to stay afloat while trying to revolutionise computing like you are .
even designing simple stuff without the fab' s component libraries for old processes would be a daunting task. (for some context, something circa the sega dreamcast era - - 350 nm / 4 layers or there abouts - - is well in the realm of what an undergraduate would be able to design with a fair bit of ease for his capstone (senior - year) project is doable by a talented single 4th year with the component libs. without the tooling, he' d be lost .) i' m sure adapteva wanted to open source their final files which went to the fab for tape - out, but you could bet your bottom dollar if they did, a take - down letter would be sent to github and adapteva would be slammed with a lawsuit .
the problem with using kickstarter to fund a venture like this is that adapteva is drastically overselling what the epiphany iv can actually deliver. 16 - 64 tiny cores with small amounts of memory, no local caches, and a relatively low clock speed can still be useful in certain workloads, but contributors aren’t buying a supercomputer — they’re buying the real - world equivalent of a self - sealing stem bolt .
fan reward: you get everything in the supporter reward and you get a black t - shirt with a parallella slogan on it' or' the book
an introduction to parallel programming
to be written by the adapteva team. (your choice) the book will be provided in pdf form and will include source code examples of parallel programs that use opencl, openmp, erlang, and mpi .
even though dual, quad, and octo - core cpus have been around for a while, it’s a far cry from truly massive parallel computing platforms. the chip manufacturer adapteva is looking to put dozens of cpus in a small package with their parallella project. as a bonus, they’re looking for funding on kickstarter, and plan to open source their 16 and 64 - core cpus after funding is complete .
this week, adapteva ceo andreas olofsson announced his company has taped out the epiphany - v, a 1024 - core risc chip that will likely offer the world’s best performance per watt for double precision arithmetic. this soc is geared for high performance computing (hpc) in applications such as self - driving cars, autonomous drones and cognitive radio, where performance - per - watt is the most critical attribute .
even when i would kill to get one of the 64 core boards, probably would be very useless. i think there is no linux distribution so tuned that could route all its duties through all those cores. we the standard users could more effectively take advantage of the 16 cores rather than the 64. probably only the enterprise markets could leverage all its power. but they won’t knock adapteva’s door. sadly 🙁
such a machine delivers around 1. 1 teraflops of oomph, and by shifting to the 64 - core epiphany - iv would push that up to 4. 3 teraflops. that' s not a lot of teraflops, and a bunch of gpu coprocessors can match that in a much smaller form factor to be sure. but the epiphany risc coprocessor is more than twice as energy efficient, according to adapteva .
we are not trying to compare intel’s costs to ours. obviously they have a huge operational advantage. they have 100, 000 employees and $ 50b in revenue. adapteva has less than 5 employees and about $ 1m in revenue. i think if you look at different metrics for performance per mm ^ 2 at equivalent technology nodes, you’ll see that the epiphany architecture has a > 10x advantage. (that’s what really matters) .
the dual a9 cores are necessary, adapteva’s epiphany iv processor is an fpu co - processor, not a full chip in and of itself. the company claims that “the parallella computer should deliver up to 45ghz of equivalent cpu performance on a board the size of a credit card while consuming only 5 watts under typical work loads. counting ghz, this is more horsepower than a high end server costing thousands of dollars and consuming 400w. ”
in the course of my travels around the world i have been fortunate enough to meet some truly great engineers. however, it' s rare that i am completely blown away by someone on the engineering front. at least, this was true until i was introduced to andreas olofsson, president and architect of adapteva inc. as far as i am concerned, andreas is
an engineer' s engineer .
clive maxfield, eetimes
rarely have i seen a journalism fail like that surrounding the launch of adapteva’s epiphany iv tile - based coprocessor. i won’t name names, but at least one enthusiastic reporter already has a future epiphany processor taking on intel and arm for the cloud server market; and most of the other coverage out there isn’t much of an improvement. let’s take a look at what epiphany actually is, and (even more importantly) what it isn’t .
help me out here. the adapteva sales pitch is claiming you get faster time to market by not having to do any fpga programming (ansi - c and opencl for the multicore coprocessors). the zynq processor seems to be just for the host os, which they say can run ubuntu out of the box and they provide open source development tools for everything else. no mention of xilinx anywhere that i can see. am i missing something ?
before we get into that program, we need to talk about the epiphany chips. they have their own instruction set, although olofsson says he was inspired by mips and arm risc processors as well as the dsps that he and his co - founders know so well. and like the massively multicore processors from tilera, the idea behind the adapteva chips is to take hoards of very modest risc processors and lash them together with an on - chip interconnect .
the parallella platform is an open source, energy efficient, high performance, and credit - card sized computer based on the epiphany multicore chips developed by adapteva. this affordable platform is designed for developing and implementing high performance, parallel processing applications developed to take advantage of the on - board epiphany chip. the epiphany 16 or 64 core chips consists of a scalable array of simple risc processors programmable in c / c + + connected together with a fast on chip network within a single shared memory architecture. included are the heat sink and two pieces of double - sided thermal tape with excellent heat conduction properties to affix the heat sink. the tape will be placed on the chips first and then the heat sink will be mounted on top. the larger piece of tape is for the zynq chip (15mm x 15mm) and the smaller piece of tape is for the adapteva epiphany chip (13mm x 13mm) .
in this slidecast, adapteva founder & ceo andreas olofsson describes the new parallella project, an open - source development platform for low - power parallel computing. in an attempt to finance the project, the company is launching parallella as a kickstarter campaign so that the development platform can be offered for only $ 99 dollars. learn more at: urltoken
inspired by great hardware communities like raspberry pi and arduino, we see a critical need for an truly open, high - performance computing platform that will close the knowledge gap in parallel programing ,
said andreas olofsson, ceo of adapteva .
high performance parallel computing is currently only accessible to a small and select group of expert programmers. the goal of the parallella project is to democratize access to parallel computing. the parallel programming dilemma is a grand challenge of computer science and we need all hands on deck .
learn more at urltoken sign up for our newsletter: urltoken
wonder if
mälardalens högskola
or any other uni in sweden would be interested in this... hmm, i think i should give a few professors a last - minute call tomorrow. @ adapteva / / andreas, how would you describe the essentials of the parallella board, but in swedish? i' m a newbie - newb lost in translation :) (send me a message on that specific note, if you feel so to be more appropriate. )
when we launched the “ $ 99 parallella project” on kickstarter in 2012, the goal was to “democratize access to supercomputing”. with a $ 99 price point, we knew that we would not make a profit, but we figured the value of reaching the whole world with our technology was enough of a reward for adapteva as a company. with over 8, 500 boards shipped to 75 countries (and over 150 universities), we are certainly off to a great start !
case in point: adapteva. the fledgling company has designed a many - core floating point processor with extremely low power consumption. current designs can scale up to 4096 cores and are built on a mainstream 65nm process to save money. the company’s website and introduction contain a great deal of information on topics we’ve also covered. it identifies the scaling issues facing multi - core / many - core devices and the challenges associated with scaling current architectures. so far, so good .
“adapteva has delivered an architecture that supports massive on - chip parallelism with impressive power efficiency. opencl provides the perfect foundation for such a processor. we leveraged this api in an sdk that provides programmers with a clear path for code development. programmers will find their parallel algorithms mapping naturally to the epiphany architecture. the chip is designed for massively parallel algorithms. extracting performance from the architecture becomes relatively easy as a result of this design. ” –david ritchie, ceo, browndeer technology
like most people in the processor and coprocessor chip rackets, adapteva thinks the future of computing is both parallel and heterogeneous. t be even more specific, the company believes that you need a clean slate approach on the coprocessors because this is the only way to get the coprocessors, which will do most of the heavy lifting on compute, to be much more efficient than the usual suspect processors we are used to on our desktops, inside out handhelds, and in our data centers .
“the future of hpc (and probably all computing) is both many core and heterogeneous. trying to get there by adapting today’s commodity processors and gpus has the benefit of better support for legacy applications, but at some stage this approach will break down. adapteva’s mimd architecture should scale better for programs with irregular data structures and program flows, and applying their epiphany architecture to the hard problems in real time data analytics seems especially intriguing. watch this space. ” –john barr, industry analyst
the problem with what adapteva is claiming is neatly summarized by a blog post on the company’s own website. on september 7, andreas olofsson published a list of parallel processing efforts by different companies. according to him, “there have been some bright spots for application specific parallel processors with limited programmability, but the success rate of general purpose parallel programmable processors is an approximate 0% . i compiled the the following list to stay sober regarding our own chances to succeed as a parallel processor company. ”
the parallella platform is an open source, energy efficient, high performance, credit - card sized computer based on the epiphany multicore chips developed by adapteva. this affordable platform is designed for developing and implementing high performance, parallel processing applications developed to take advantage of the on - board epiphany chip. the epiphany 16 or 64 core chips consists of a scalable array of simple risc processors programmable in c / c + + connected together with a fast on chip network within a single shared memory architecture .
the parallella platform is an open source, energy efficient, high performance, credit - card - sized computer based on the epiphany multicore chips developed by adapteva. this affordable platform is designed for developing and implementing high performance, parallel processing applications developed to take advantage of the on - board epiphany chip. the epiphany 16 - core chips consist of a scalable array of simple risc processors programmable in c / c + + connected together with a fast on - chip network within a single shared memory architecture .
suffice it to say that olofsson and his compatriots at adapteva – roman trogan, director of hardware development, oleg raikhman, director of software development, and yaniv sapir, director of application development, who all hail from analog devices and worked on the tigersharc dsps – believe that for parallel computing to take off, devices have to be simple, cheap, and accessible. and so they designed the epiphany line of processors to be used as coprocessors as well to make them more accessible and therefore useful .
epiphany’s overall mesh design, where the cores are laid out on tiles and each tile has a five - port router that connects it to four neighbors (the fifth port faces the core), is complex and greatly increases the challenge of programming for the device, but it was done to save power. to do a 64 - core design with a crossbar switch or ring bus would be a power - consumption nightmare, so adapteva, like fellow coprocessor startup tilera, has gone with a mesh topology .
while adapteva did not meet its pie - in - the - sky dream of raising $ 3m to fully fund a set of multi - core epiphany risc coprocessors and parallella system boards that make use of them, the company does have 4, 965 backers who pledged $ 898, 921 and have ordered over 6, 300 boards using various epiphany processors matched up with zync dual - core arm cortex a9 processors from xilinx, which peddles those arm chips mashed up with its field programmable gate arrays (fpgas) .
@ adapteva, i was thinking more of the 2x mini - cloud but with the new boards. don' t know if that would just be $ 1500 or you' d have some other idea on price. mostly i was looking for
ready to use
as opposed to
dave, go find all the cabling and stuff you need to put this together
, as i' m more a software than hardware guy, so the less i need to put together myself, the better. ; - )
the reason intel, amd, and nvidia haven’t gone down this road is because the final product is extremely specialized. adapteva has created an fpu co - processor that’s extremely good at a very narrow set of tasks. unfortunately, this is completely out of step with the general goals of the computing industry. over the past thirty years, controllers and co - processors that once required their own expansion cards or motherboard sockets have steadily moved away from separate hardware implementations and towards integration — first on the motherboard, and now on the processor .
what adapteva has done is to make a coprocessor by arranged 16 or more minimalist, floating - point - heavy cpu cores on one die. programmers can then send blocks of floating - point code from the cpu out to this mesh, which would ideally be located on - die in an soc, for faster, more power - efficient computation than could be done on the cpu’s own floating - point hardware. that’s the general gist of it, and it sounds pretty reasonable. but as always, the devil is in the details .
if you don' t want to do much work at all and want to start playing with a baby cluster of these parallella - 16 system boards, adapteva is selling those as well for $ 575. that includes four of the parallella - 16 cards with connectors, four 16gb sd cards loaded up with canonical' s ubuntu server 12. 04, a power supply, and 20 metal standoff legs to screw the boards into a tower of computing power. the parallella - 16 card is a mere 3. 4 inches by 2. 1 inches .
despite the enormous interest, it’s going take years until our epiphany chip business can stand on its own. this is just the reality of the semiconductor design - in cycle. this means that despite the generous investment from ericsson and carmel ventures, we can no longer afford to subsidize the cost of the parallella boards and will have to raise the price slightly so that everyone involved can stay motivated (including adapteva, our us manufacture, and our distributors). as we the sales ramp up, we will work hard to reduce prices and bring to market parallella versions at $ 99 and below !
the energy - efficient adapteva epiphany architecture exhibits massive many - core scalability in a physically compact 2d array of risc cores with a fast network - on - chip (noc). with fully divergent cores capable of mimd execution, the physical topology and memory - mapped capabilities of the core and network translate well to partitioned global address space (pgas) parallel programming models. following an investigation into the use of two - sided communication using threaded mpi, one - sided communication using shmem is being explored. here we present work in progress on the development of an openshmem 1. 2 implementation for the epiphany architecture .
the parallella project is being launched by adapteva, a semiconductor startup company founded in 2008. the core development team consists of andreas olofsson, roman trogan, and yaniv sapir, each with between 10 and 20 years of industry experience. the team has a strong reputation of executing on aggressive goals on a shoestring budget. our latest epiphany - iv processor was designed in a leading edge 28nm process and started sampling in july, demonstrating 50 gflops / watt. to put this in perspective, consider that the epiphany energy efficiency specs are within striking distance of the 2018 goals set by darpa for the high profile exascale supercomputing project .
that’s quite a feat given that the 4. 5 billion - transistor chip is manufactured with the same technology nvidia uses for their latest pascal gpus, namely tsmc’s 16nm finfet process. epiphany - v differs from its 64 - core epiphany - iv predecessor in a number of important ways. to start with, it’s the first adapteva design to support double precision floating point math, which is a requirement for many hpc codes. in addition, the risc processing elements are capable of hosting an os, something that the previous version was incapable of doing. that makes it more like an intel xeon phi than a gpu accelerator .
adapteva still wants to be an exascale player in the high performance computing arena, and as el reg has previously reported, has set its sights on creating two chips by 2018 to reach its exascale aspirations. one future epiphany chip is an entry coprocessor with 1, 000 cores on a die that delivers 2 teraflops of performance in a 2 watt thermal envelope. the second is a massive chip with 64, 000 cores with 1mb of sram per core that can deliver 100 teraflops of floating point coprocessing at 100 watts. the plan is to have both chips deliver 1 teraflops per watt using the 7 nanometer wafer baking processes that are expected to be generally available by 2018 .
“massive parallelism is the only way to meet both the computing performance demands and the power limitations in future, advanced embedded signal processing applications. processor architectures need to be built on simple, scalable principles. powerful processors and straightforward means for moving data around is a key to high throughput in streaming applications. to my understanding, the adapteva epiphany architecture has been designed based on such principles. it has been a positive experience for my research group and students to use the epiphany and try it out on challenging industrial applications. our students and post - docs have been able to use the architectural features as well as the programming tools efficiently already at their first tries. ” –bertil svensson, p rofessor and director of ceres, halmstad university
the gpu started out as a dedicated asic for handling graphics, and that’s how it landed its spot alongside the cpu as an essential system component. it later evolved to take on more general - purpose parallel computation—i. e. , it became a true math coprocessor—but the gpu’s “meal ticket” has always been graphics. client systems need display processing horsepower, and the gpu provides it, so the gpu always makes it into the system design budget; and it also helps that you can use gpu as a highly parallel math coprocessor. sure, there are more power efficient math coprocessor designs, like adapteva’s, that will get you more gflops / watt than a gpu, but, again, the gpu’s main claim to an essential place in every client system is that it does the graphics heavy lifting .
“high performance embedded computing is naturally split into high throughput front end processing tasks and high complexity back end processing tasks. fpgas are great at front end bit shuffling type operations but have proven challenging to use for high complexity algorithms, some requiring floating point scaling. microprocessors are great for the highly complex processing with 100k lines of code found at the back end. however, none of the traditional products on the market today gives a satisfactory processing solution to the middle - end processing step where both massive throughput, low power, and complex floating point point math is needed. this is where adapteva’s epiphany multicore architecture comes in, with just the right amount of flexibility to provide outstanding energy efficiency while not sacrificing the traditional c - programming model we have grown accustomed to. ” — mikael taveniku, ceo, xcube
chipmaker adapteva has hit its funding goal for the company’s parallella project. as hpcwire reported last month, the company decided to employ the micro - investor platform known as kickstarter to speed development of its manycore epiphany floating point accelerator. the latest design promises a stunning 50 gigaflops per watt, but getting the silicon into the hands of developers has been a challenge. the company set out to get at least $ 750, 000 worth of pledges to fund a project that would deliver an epiphany coprocessor board to all interested parties – mainly programmers who were looking to kick the tires on a unique and highly parallel computing architecture. the pledge window was just 30 days, which began on september 27. when the kickstarter clock ran out, parallela had signed up $ 898, 921 from 4, 965 backers. full article
the thing that all of these other coprocessor ideas have in common is that the gpu, which is always going to be there regardless, can do what they do in a pinch, but they can’t do what the gpu does in a pinch. so even though epiphany can best a gpu’s performance / watt ratio on certain types of code by 2x, that’s still probably not going to be enough to win it a place alongside the gpu as a second coprocessor. maybe if it beat the gpu by, say, 4x, and maybe if epiphany had real caches with coherency and a non - niche isa, it would have a shot at a cell phone or tablet soc. but as - is, i’m just not seeing it. i’d love for olofsson and the plucky crew at adapteva to prove me wrong, though .
the energy - efficient adapteva epiphany architecture exhibits massive many - core scalability in a physically compact 2d array of risc cores with a fast network - on - chip (noc). the architecture presents many features and constraints which contribute to software design challenges for the application developer. addressing these challenges within the software stack that supports application development is critical to improving productivity and expanding the range of applications for the architecture. we report here on advances that have been made in the coprthr - 2 software stack targeting the epiphany architecture that address critical issues identified in previous work. specifically, we describe improvements that bring greater control and precision to the design of compact compiled binary programs in the context of the limited per - core local memory of the architecture. we describe a new design for run - time support that has been implemented to dramatically improve the program load and execute performance and capabilities. finally, we describe developments that advance host - coprocessor interoperability to expand the functionality available to the application developer .
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san jose (ca) - if it' s the number of cores that gets computers excited these days, then ibm may have its hands on the ultimate processor. together with rapport, a silicon valley startup, the company previewed the kilocore1025, a processor with a total of 1025 cores that promises not only to boost processing speed but also to operate at low power levels.
adapteva is a fabless semiconductor company focusing on low power many core microprocessor design . the company was the second company to announce a design with 1,000 specialized processing cores on a single integrated circuit . adapteva was founded in 2008 with the goal of bringing a ten times advancement in floating-point performance per watt for the mobile device market . products are based on its epiphany multi-core mimd architecture and its parallella kickstarter project promoting " a supercomputer for everyone " in september 2012 . the company name is a combination of " adapt " and the hebrew word " teva " meaning nature . 
adapteva is a fabless semiconductor company focusing on low power many core microprocessor design. the company was the second company to announce a design with 1,000 specialized processing cores on a single integrated circuit. adapteva was founded in 2008 with the goal of bringing a ten times advancement in floating-point performance per watt for the mobile device market. products are based on its epiphany multi-core mimd architecture and its parallella kickstarter project promoting " a supercomputer for everyone " in september 2012. the company name is a combination of " adapt " and the hebrew word " teva " meaning nature.
adapteva is a fabless semiconductor company focusing on low power many core microprocessor design. the company was the second company to announce a design with 1,000 specialized processing cores on a single integrated circuit. adapteva was founded in 2008 with the goal of bringing a ten times advancement in floating-point performance per watt for the mobile device market. products are based on its epiphany multi-core mimd architecture and its parallella kickstarter project promoting " a supercomputer for everyone " in september 2012. the company name is a combination of " adapt " and the hebrew word " teva " meaning nature.