Clearspeed, the Bristol parallel processor company, is in talks with AMD about developing a closely-coupled co-processor to soup up the AMD multi-core family of x86 processors.
“Clearspeed is talking to AMD about producing a closely-coupled co-processor,” said Jeff Underhill, business development manager for 64-bit embedded applications at AMD.
The talks may be the result of an awareness of the stunning performance of the IBM/Sony/Toshiba microprocessor Cell.
A future product for AMD is QuadCore, due out next year, a four-core microprocessor delivering double the performance of AMD’s current two-core product, DualCore.
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Dual Clearspeed processors on a PCI card - 50Gflops of extra performance
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However, Cell uses 8 processors around a PowerPC core to deliver a quarter of a Teraflops or 256 billion flops.
Of course, x86 is Cisc, and Cell is Risc and so can run faster, nonetheless the difference in performance between Cell and QuadCore is such that AMD may consider a co-processor option.
Clearspeed has experience of producing ultra-high-speed accelerator chips to boost computing power, while maximising power per Watt.
The Bristol-based firm's CSX600 chip has 96 processor cores, runs at 250MHz, dissipates 10W, and adds 25Gflops to a computer’s performance.
The problems in implementing multi-core processors in practice are, according to Chris Rowen, CEO of Tensilica, which automates microprocessor generation, are: “A need for new tools and software for application-centric energy management; a need for new tools, software and training for multi-processor programming; significant silicon improvements for lower voltage and capacitance, and automation in multi-processor partitioning and interconnect.”
www.amd.com
www.clearspeed.com