Fabless chip company Kalray SA (Orsay, France), the developer of the MPPA-256 many-core processor has announced a PCIe format printed circuit board that contains four of the 28nm processors to provide 1024-core processor PCB.
The company, which has recently raised $8 million in additional funding and appointed Eric Baissus as CEO, calls the board Turbocard and has included 32-Gbytes of DRAM. The company claims the board is capable of 1TFLOPS of performance while consuming 50 watts.
Turbocard2 measures 111.15mm by 312mm being a full height, full length, single-slot PCIe board. It follows on from the Emb01 launched in December 2013. The Turbocard2 will start shipping to priority customers in September 2014 with general availability following on in 4Q14, Kalray said. Kalray did not indicate how much they are charging for the board.
The MPPA architecture allows 256 processors, organized as 16 clusters of 16, to work in parallel and communicate via a network-on-chip just as clusters of computers do on the Internet. Kalray has chosen a proprietary VLIW [very long instruction word] architecture integrating a 32-bit/64-bit floating point calculation unit.
With regard to scaling up the architecture Kalray is planning to produce a 1024-core processor by 2016 but has not yet made a process technology decision. However, a 64-core chip is likely to appear on the market before the 1024-core version.
New money, new CEO
Kalray, which was founded in 2008, raised $19.1 million in 2008 and 2009 and a Series B of $7.8 million January 2011. To these funds it has added $8 million in funding, with the round led by ACE Management, CEA Investissement and private investors including Eurekap.
The money will be used to to develop Kalray's international market presence and prepare its next generation chip (see Kalray Eyes FDSOI for Many Core Processors).
Gilles Delfassy, formerly of ST-Ericsson, and Eric Bantegnie, founder and CEO of Esterel Technologies, have joined the supervisory board as president and vice-president, respectively. Eric Baissus, formerly with Alcatel-Lucent, has joined as CEO, replacing Kalray's previous CEO Joel Monnier who will continue to support the company in a non-executive role.
Baissus worked for Texas Instruments in late 1990s and founded OpenPlug, an embedded software company, in 2002. Baissus joined Alcatel-Lucent when the company acquired OpenPlug in 2010.
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