Adapteva Announces OpenCL SDK

Semiconductor technology startup Adapteva is providing an early access release of its OpenCL SDK for the Epiphany multicore architecture. The OpenCL implementation was completed along with Brown Deer Technology, a leading innovator in the use of emerging hybrid CPU/GPU computing platforms.

According to the announcement, OpenCL is an open, royalty-free standard for cross-platform, parallel programming that is used in servers and handheld/embedded devices. OpenCL (Open Computing Language) provides a portable API for accessing the compute capabilities of a platform, accelerating performance in applications ranging from gaming and entertainment to scientific and medical software. With the OpenCL SDK, programmers can accelerate compute intensive tasks across an arbitrary number of cores on Epiphany-based accelerator solutions.

The company also announced the Epiphany IV chip, which includes 64 independent high-performance RISC cores on a single chip, effectively offering more than 50 GHz of achievable programmable performance while consuming less than 2 watts. According to the company, initial testing of the Epiphany-IV chips has demonstrated unprecedented performance numbers, including: 800MHz peak operating frequency; 51.2 GHz of equivalent microprocessor performance; and peak performance of 100 GFLOPS.