Kalray's processor promises computing power of up to 500 billion operations per second with higher energy efficiency than other processors. The chip is aimed at at image processing, signal processing, control, communications and date security applications.
The Kalray processor cores implement a proprietary VLIW architecture with advanced low-power design techniques, and integrate a high-performance IEEE 754 floating-point unit. The 256 processors in the MPPA-256 are organized as 16 clusters of 16 processors and communicate with each other via a network-on-chip just as large clusters of computers do on the Internet. Multiple MPPA chips can be interconnected at the PCB level through Interlaken interfaces to increase the processor array size and performance capability.The French processor startup was found in 2008 and is backed by French investment funds, local funds, private investors, and OSEO, a French public-sector institution. The company is headed by Joel Monnier, former vice-president of research at STMicroelectronics.
Alongside the MPPA processor Kaleay provides customers with its software development environment called AccessCore. It also offers a GNU C/C++ development tools and libraries including primitives for task and data parallelism. The AccessCore development environment provides a C-based programming model including Linux support for legacy functions as well as a high-level dataflow environment. Standard GCC & GDB technologies are used for compilation & debug.