01/24/12
European startup attempts many-core revolution
Kalray, a company led by STMicroelectronics former vice president R&D, is on a mission to launch a relatively general-purpose many-core processor. The France based company claims it can combine the hardware with necessary software to break through the many-core barrier with a 256 processor array integrated on a 28-nm CMOS chip.
Kalray has dubbed its approach MPPA for Multi Purpose Processor Array and claims that its architecture allows 256 processors, organized as 16 clusters of 16, to work in parallel and communicate via a network-on-chip just as clusters of computers do on the Internet. Kalray has chosen a proprietary VLIW [very long instruction word] architecture integrating a 32-bit/64-bit floating point calculation unit.
The chip is expected to deliver about 200-GOPS at 400-MHz clock frequency and a maximum performance of about 500-GOPS at power consumption of about 5 watts.
However, such specifications cannot be easy to achieve. Kalray not only has to build a many-core processor in a leading-edge process but also demonstrate ways to make writing software transparent and easy. and getting the code to run efficiently.
The chip was due in the fourth quarter of 2011, according to the company's website. It is not clear if that has been achieved.
It is generally acknowledged that building many-core processors for well chosen applications, such as PicoChip's array for basestation protocol execution and NetLogic chips for networking is a tractable problem. However, making such an array that meets more general needs and which can power up and power down cores to deliver efficient processing for different types of application is notoriously difficult.
Plurality Ltd. (Netanya, Israel) announced its HyperCore acceleration processor IP in April 2010. This was also a 256-core processor albeit one aimed at wireless infrastructure applications.
According to its website Kalray is aiming its chip at a broader set of applications that can benefit from parallelization; imaging, telecommunications infrastructure, data security, network appliances and embedded applications.
The company was founded in July 2008 and has raised more than $20 million in venture capital.
