Kalray sampling its first 28nm processors

Posted on Tuesday, September 11 2012 @ 17:05 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
EE Times reports chip designer Kalray is sampling its first 28nm MPPA-256 processors. These 256-core processors are designed for embedded applications, they were created in cooperation with Global Unichip, a design services provider, and manufactured by TSMC.

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.

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.
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.


About the Author

Thomas De Maesschalck

Thomas has been messing with computer since early childhood and firmly believes the Internet is the best thing since sliced bread. Enjoys playing with new tech, is fascinated by science, and passionate about financial markets. When not behind a computer, he can be found with running shoes on or lifting heavy weights in the weight room.



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