Kickstarting high-performance energy-efficient manycore architectures with Epiphany
Andreas Olofsson, Tomas Nordström, Zain Ul-Abdin · 2014 48th Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems and Computers · 2014
In this paper we introduce Epiphany as a highperformance energy-efficient manycore architecture suitable for real-time embedded systems. This scalable architecture supports floating point operations in hardware and achieves 50 GFLOPS/W in 28 nm technology, making it suitable for high performance streaming applications like radio base stations and radar signal processing. Through an efficient 2D mesh Network-on-Chip and a distributed shared memory model, the architecture is scalable to thousands of cores on a single chip. An Epiphany-based open source computer named Parallella was launched in 2012 through Kickstarter crowd funding and has now shipped to thousands of customers around the world.