Lean all about Adapteva chip that’ll make your phone a 64-core supercomputer

Here's some fantastic news for your tablets and smartphones! Well, you always knew that the latest application processors in the market are speeding up web site load times and computing power. But wait! Adapteva, a startup firm based in Lexington, has designed a 64-core chip accelerator that will enable the application processor and graphics engine compute more on the device itself as against sending it over cellular or Wi-Fi networks. Imagine the super sonic speed that your cellphone will be blessed with if the data is processed internally. And all this enabled by a low-power envelope and occupying only about 8mm square of space. Now, isn't that super news?Of course, Adapteva is yet to justify the business need of this chip running at 1 watt, it may just hit the right chord with the market as people today are increasingly looking to handle speech and facial recognition and also play hard-core video games on their mobile devices.

64-core Adapteva chip

64-core Adapteva chip factbox

What’s great

Computing power - The 64-core Adapteva chip helps your smartphone offload work from the application processor or graphics engine anddo more computing on the device as opposed to sending it over a cellular or a Wi-Fi network.

Battery Friendly - As more work would get done locally, the over-the-network traffic would be minimized. That would mean a better battery life. Low-power - The 1 watt usage is great news for the mobile world where power comes at a premium.

Scalability - The chip is currently scalable up to 64 cores in smartphones and 4,000 cores in servers.

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64-core Adapteva chip

Adapteva chip that’ll make your phone a 64-core supercomputer.

What’s not so great

It's still an unproven technology and the benefits are yet not time-tested. The 64-core Adapteva chip isn't designed to work as a full-fledged CPU.

Verdict

With its ability to multi-task like gaming and speech/facial recognition, small size of 8mm square, low-power of one watt, the 64-core chip is likely to be well received by a loyal market. Though it's early days yet, who knows, the reception may soon make way for rage once the product is actually launched.

Word around the web

Andreas Olofsson, the founder and CEO of Adapteva says:"In the mobile world where devices need to run all day, yet avoid bulky batteries, power consumption is at a premium. So that’s where Adapteva will focus for its big push."

Jeff Milrod, CEO of Bittware says:

"Adapteva has injected some much needed creativity into the embedded signal processing world."