Startup Wants To Put 64-Cores In Your Smartphone

angry tapir writes "Startup chip design company Adapteva has announced the multicore Epiphany processor, which is designed to accelerate applications in servers and low-power devices such as smartphones and tablets. The RISC-based processor is scalable to thousands of cores on a single chip, and can sit alongside CPUs to provide real-time execution of diverse applications. Epiphany chips are currently scalable up to 64 cores in smartphones and up to 4,000 cores in servers. The processor can accelerate tasks like hand gesture recognition, face matching or face tracking, but is not designed to be a full-fledged CPU."

Comments

Re:a toaster oven

[timeOday]

Nah, the total number of transistors in those 64 cores is probably a small fraction of the transistors in one modern CPU - more like stream processing units in a GPU (a GPU has several hundred).

Modern CPUs use huge numbers of transistors for small increases in speed, so there's no question such a chip would be much more efficient for tasks that fit it - again, like GPUs.