In the present world, Smartphones and tablets are seeking further computing power. Thus, Adapteva is trying to utilize this opportunity by utilizing the server type performances to their devices by announcing a chip on Monday.


According to Andreas Olofsson, Adapteva's CEO, Epiphany IV chip is capable of packing 64 cores and offers great performance of 70 gigaflops while utilizing just 1 watt power. As told by Olofsson, 1watt power may be higher for smartphones, but the performance as well as the power used by the cores can be reduced significantly to speed up the tasks through hand gesture recognition and face recognition.


Truly speaking, chip is not capable of hosting an operating system and therefore would be used as a coprocessor to take the load of processing off CPU. Faster data exchange can be initiated in Epiphany IV through a mesh design. Besides, the parallel cores in Epiphany have been arranged in a way to facilitate multiple contact points so as to receive and transfer the data. Thus, these cores can be easily added so as to increase the performance while multiple communication points are used in resolving the numerous bandwidth problems.


Olofsson stated, “We're not attempting to take on Intel or ARM, we're trying to sit next to it.” The mobile ambition of Adapteva is a result of initial foray into supercomputing space which uses chips for all the grid based tasks like environmental modeling. The company has just five employees including one license whose name is not yet disclosed.


Adding to virtues of Adapteva, Olofsson stated that Epiphany IV’s small size as well as its lower power attribute makes it the best processor in both smart phones and tablets. The company is also planning to license its chip design to a mobile chip maker. Till date, the reception has been truly great as announced by Olofsson. It is truly pleasing to know that accelerator can also be fit in a system-on-chip by adding the CPU with numerous graphic and video acceleration units.


Olofsson added, “Our goal is to get into the next genesis of smartphones and tablets.”


As per Olofsson, the Epiphany is based on RISC (reduced education set computing) design. Actually, the chips consume maximum 25 milliwatt power at the peak of their performance while the chips used in smart phones and tablets can have a maximum of 64 cores. The new chip is designed using the 28 nm process and possess additive power as well as performance upgrade in comparison to previous machines made of 65-nm process. Besides, the previous chip which was announced in the early part of 2011 had 16 cores and used just 1 watt of power.


According to Olofsson, 64-core extension design of Epiphany IV will be usable in the food market by the first quarter of 2012.


Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst at Insight 64, stated that, Adapteva’s chip is not a simple processor and is greatly different from other accelerators which consume greater power that leads to acceleration of certain scientific and math applications.