The semiconductor technology company located in Lexington, Massachusetts, Adapteva has revealed the 4th generation Epiphany multicore architecture IP in 28 nm chip design.
The single chip of the Epiphany-IV features 64 RISC high performance cores and offers a high degree of energy efficiency achieved by any point processor solution at 70 GFLOPS per watt.
The scalable RISC processors in the Epiphany architecture allow it to simultaneously power individual programs. Since the architecture allows complete programming in C and C++, this allows the developer to develop various high performance applications and achieve a faster marketing time.
The Chief Executive Officer of Adapteva, Andreas Olofsson stated that with the release of the 28nm architecture Epiphany-IV, higher computing power can be achieved at a smaller footprint, devoid of increased energy drain. Olofsson further explained that the latest platform makes it possible to achieve the 2018 goal set by DARPA of gaining 50 GFLOPS per watt in advanced computing applications. The Epiphany-IV IP operates at a maximum of 800 MHz and its architecture can incorporate 4096 cores on a chip connected using Adapteva’s low-power Network-on-Chip (Patent Pending) technology.
CoreMark results indicate that the earlier generation of Epiphany-III chip achieves performance levels of various server-type microprocessors while consuming peak power of under 2W. The latest Epiphany-IV chip has been designed to achieve four times the performance improvement while consuming the same peak power as the Epiphany-III chip.
The features of the architecture includes an IEEE floating point instruction set, a shared low latency local memory for every processor node, a 6.4 Gbps network bandwidth per processor, a 25 Gbps local memory bandwidth, a 0.13mm2 processor tile size with 25mW power and a distributed memory system that allows seamless integration. The high-performance, low-power approach will enable server-level computing in portable handheld devices such as tablets and the multicore IP technology is best suited for mobile markets, machine vision, software defined radio, speech recognition, security, medical diagnostics and radar.