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Company type | Private |
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Industry | Semiconductor industry |
Founded | Bristol, UK (2002 ) |
Headquarters | , |
Products | Coprocessors |
Number of employees | Less than 10 (2009) |
Website | ClearSpeed.com |
ClearSpeed Technology Ltd was a semiconductor company, formed in 2002 to develop enhanced SIMD processors for use in high-performance computing and embedded systems. Based in Bristol, UK, the company has been selling its processors since 2005.[1] Its current 192-core CSX700 processor was released in 2008,[2] but a lack of sales has forced the company to downsize[3] and it has since delisted from the London stock exchange.[4][5]
The CSX700 processor consists of two processing arrays, each with 96 processing elements. The processing elements each contain a 32/64-bit floating point multiplier, a 32/64-bit floating point adder, 6 KB of SRAM, an integer arithmetic logic unit, and a 16-bit integer multiply–accumulate unit.[6] It currently sells its CSX700 processor on a PCI Express expansion card with 2 GB of memory, called the Advance e710. The card is supplied with the ClearSpeed Software Development Kit and application libraries.[7]
Related multi-core architectures include Ambric, PicoChip, Cell BE, Texas Memory Systems, and GPGPU stream processors such as AMD FireStream and Nvidia Tesla. ClearSpeed competes with AMD and Nvidia in the hardware acceleration market, where computationally intensive applications offload tasks to the accelerator. As of 2009, only the ClearSpeed e710 performs 64-bit arithmetic at its peak computational rate.[8]