Epiphany Multicore IP

August 19, 2012 admin
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Epiphany – A breakthrough in parallel processing

The Epiphany multicore coprocessor is a scalable shared memory architecture, featuring up to 4,096 processors on a single chip connected through a high-bandwidth on-chip network. Each Epiphany processor core includes a tiny high performance  floating point RISC processor built from scratch for multicore processing, a high bandwidth local memory system, and an extensive set of built in hardware features for multicore communication. The Epiphany coprocessor is ANSI-C and OpenCL programmable and works in cooperation with standard microprocessors to provide unprecedented level of real-time processing to performance and power constrained mobile devices like smartphones and tablet computers, as well as improving performance levels for an array of other parallel computing platforms.

Features

  • Complete multicore solution featuring a high performance microprocessor ISA, Network-On-Chip, and distributed memory system
  • Fully-featured ANSI-C programmable GNU/Eclipse based tool chain
  • Scalable to 1000’s of cores and TFLOPS of performance on a single chip
  • 1GHz superscalar RISC processor cores
  • IEEE Floating Point Instruction Set
  • Shared memory architecture with up to 128KB memory at each processor node
  • Zero startup-cost messaging passing
  • Vector Interrupt Controller
  • Distributed Multicore Multidimensional DMAs
  • 32 GB/sec local memory bandwidth per core
  • 8GB/sec per processor network bandwidth
  • 72 GFLOPS/Watt energy efficiency
  • Processor tile size of 0.5mm^2 at 65nm, 0.128mm^2 at 28nm

Epiphany Benefits

  • Out-of-the box floating point C programs enables significantly faster time to market and lower development costs compared to ASIC or FPGA based solutions.
  • Up to 100X advantage in energy efficiency compared to traditional multicore floating point processors offers breakthrough improvements in battery life, cost of ownership, and reliability.
  • Unparalleled performance, as much as 5 TFLOPs on a single chip, enables a new set of high performance applications.
  • Low latency zero-overhead inter-core communication simplifies parallel programming.
  • Scalable architecture allows code reuse across a wide range of markets and applications from smart-phones all the way to leading edge supercomputers.

Mobile Applications

  • Are your customers complaining that their mobile device runs out of battery too fast?
  • Do you lack the money, team, or time needed to convert your floating point C-based reference application to a fixed point FPGA/ASIC hardware implementation?
  • Do you have a killer app in mind that won’t become practical until 2016 based on existing mobile processor roadmaps?

High Performance Applications:

  • Would you benefit from reducing your processing latencies to microseconds and still being able to program in ANSI-C?
  • Do you lack the electrical and cooling infrastructure needed to operate a state of the art high performance system?
  • Are you only seeing 10-15% of the advertised maximum performance of your current vendor’s manycore solution?
  • Are you frustrated with the steep learning curve and proprietary development environments of existing floating pointaccelerator technologies?

Example Configurations:

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