Ambric, massive object-oriented parallelism

Massive parallel processor architectures seem to be the new way to riches, or at least something that might earn you a few minutes in the spotlight. But what good is all the parallel processing power if hardly anyone is able to utilize it effectively? This is precisely the question that must have been asked by Ambric’s founders when they decided to start the company. Founded in 2003 and with a head count just short of sixty, Ambric made a splash with their Am2045 processor when it was introduced last fall. Fabricated in the 0.13 micron process, it featured 360 32-bit RISC cores that when all running at 333MHz could deliver a theoretical performance of about one trillion operations per second. What was even more interesting though was the novel programming approach that assumed that due to the abundance of cores, software objects could be mapped on a core by core basis, thus not having to share resources. This idea is depicted in the figure below, where the numbers 1 through 7 represent the individual cores that are linked via communication channels. When Ambric's compiler detects that a software object is a primitive object it maps it to a single processor, however, when more complex computations are required several cores can be combined into a composite object which than will host the more complex application.

Given the object oriented programming model; it is not surprising that Ambric chose Java as the fundamental development language for the processor. Utilizing the Eclipse development framework and a few proprietary language extensions, the task of programming this massive array of processors seems to require less of a learning curve than most other massively parallel architectures, that either force programmers to learn new and unfamiliar languages, or might even require the usage of Verilog or VHDL. This is likely to be a major advantage for Ambric, for time to market is important and the shorter it takes for programmer to start cranking out useful code rather than "hello world" applications, the more likely they are going to favor one architecture over another. Now, with all this Java talk, do not think of the Am2045 as a Java chip, for the source code is not compiled into Java bytecode, but rather directly into the native machine language. For a complete overview of the architecture as well as short programming and development tool discussion, take a look at the Microprocessor Report article by Tom R. Halfhill that Ambric was nice enough to post on their web-site. It has some very good illustrations and additionally discusses Ambric’s closest competitors.

In the meantime, Ambric has not been standing still. At the beginning of November, it was reported that Ambric was nearing the close of a $30 million funding round that would bring the total funding for the company to $51 million to date. Additionally, the company has also been busy working on delivering the Am2045B processor to market. Compared to the AM2045, the Am2045B delivers a 40 percent increase in channel connectivity between the cores, and each core is now able to run at up to 350 MHz. Additionally, Ambric also claims that the power consumption has been reduced by 40 percent, or to about 6 to 12 Watts depending on the application. For about $325 a pop, in quantities of thousands, this is quite some processing power one can obtain with what looks to be a very promising development environment.