Adapteva chip to transform smartphones into supercomputers
                           
For the proud owners of smartphones and tablets there is welcome news in the launch of a chip by Adapteva which speeds up the smartphone and transforms it into a supercomputer. This multicore Epiphany processor accelerates the application in low power devices and servers.

The processor can scale to many cores, which can go up to thousands on one chip while sitting alongside CPUs at the same time for providing real-time execution of various kinds of applications as stated by the CEO of Adapteva, Andreas Olofsson. The chips can currently scale about 4,000 cores on servers and 64 cores on smartphones.

PC and smartphone chips these days have CPUs which offer general purpose processing and have specialized cores which are also known as accelerators that perform some specific functions like video processing.

Adapteva chip give your smartphones the chance to get the advantages of a flexible accelerator of multiple cores which can perform many different kinds of functions instead of just staying restricted to some particular tasks.

The processor is based on the design of reduced instruction set computing or RISC as it is better known. It has floating point capabilities and is extremely power efficient.

The chip with 16 cores running at 1 GHz consumes even less than 1 watt of energy and the battery life is really long and good.

The processor helps in the acceleration of tasks like face tracking or face matching and gesture recognition, the capabilities of which are quite limited in smartphones because of their lower profile chip’s processing power, which is limited.

The processors of Adapteva can execute these applications very quickly, while consuming a very small amount of power at the same time.

The chip is different from graphics processing units or GPUs in their ability to run many C programs which get used in supercomputers for the processing of graphics, science and math tasks. Proprietary binary libraries taken from the vendors are used by some GPUs.

But in case of the Epiphany processors from Adapteva they can run the usual ANSI-C applications just like that. There are libraries provided so that programmers can be productive. However, there is no memory management unit so there is no scope for acting as hosts for operating systems like Windows or Linux.

The Epiphany processor cannot operate as a full-fledged XPU and execution of programs which have millions of lines of code are not possible. Full-fledged CPUs like X86 processors with large memory capabilities and broad instruction set can run such applications.

The processor is meant for a manufacturing process of 65 nanometers but there are hopes that the 28nm process will be reached in the near future.