Startup Has Big Plans for Tiny Chip Technology

(THE WALL STREET JOURNAL): Not many people these days propose radically new ideas for microprocessors, a costly business with big, entrenched competitors. Andreas Olofsson is doing it anyway. The Swedish-born entrepreneur, founder and CEO of a startup called Adapteva, is discussing plans this week to add a new kind of circuitry to chips–vastly increasing their ability to solve certain kinds of mathematics problems. Where today’s general-purpose microprocessors might have one to eight calculating engines, Adapteva expects to fit 64 of its tiny, specialized processors on a typical cellphone chip–and potentially nearly 1,000 cores in other cases. Using a next-generation production process, Olofsson thinks adding 4,000 electronic brains to a chip will be no problem. Full Article