Adapteva aims to speed phones with many-core chips

Startup chip firm Adapteva is aiming to give a performance boost to smartphones with a novel many-core processor architecture designed to speed compute-intensive applications such as face recognition and real-time speech decoding.

Adapteva said that its Epiphany architecture can to scale to thousands of parallel processors on a single chip, all connected through a high-bandwidth on-chip network, but with an emphasis on low power consumption.

This is expected to deliver an unprecedented level of real-time processing in performance and power-constrained mobile devices like smartphones and tablet computers, according to the firm.

"With the Epiphany multi-core architecture, the application lag-time inherent in today's mobile computing environment can become a thing of the past," said Andreas Olofsson, Adapteva founder and chief executive.

Olofsson claimed that tasks beyond the reach of the latest quad-core phone chips, such as virtual content overlay, face recognition and real-time speech recognition, will be able to run on the handset itself using Epiphany.

However, Adapteva does not expect its technology to replace existing processor designs, but is instead licensing it as a multi-core accelerator to sit on a system-on-a-chip alongside one or more ARM processor cores, for example.

In the Epiphany architecture, each node is a superscalar 1GHz processor core with a maximum performance of two gigaflops per second, with all nodes interconnected by a 2D mesh network with a communication latency of less than 10ns.

A reference platform developed by Adapteva features 16 cores and off-chip links with 8GB/sec total bandwidth, and demonstrates a claimed performance level of 35 gigaflops per watt of energy consumed. The version that will be integrated into commercial chips is set to have 64 cores.

One aspect that could be key to Epiphany's success is that the accelerator can be programmed in standard ANSI-C, so existing applications and open source library code will execute without modification, according to Adapteva.

The company said it is in talks with a number of potential partners, but the only current licensee is BittWare, a firm specialising in hardware-based signal processing solutions.