ClearSpeed Technology Ltd is a semiconductor company, formed in 2002 to develop enhanced SIMD

SIMD

Single instruction, multiple data , is a class of parallel computers in Flynn's taxonomy. It describes computers with multiple processing elements that perform the same operation on multiple data simultaneously...

 processors for use in high-performance computing

High-performance computing

High-performance computing uses supercomputers and computer clusters to solve advanced computation problems. Today, computer systems approaching the teraflops-region are counted as HPC-computers.-Overview:...

 and embedded system

Embedded system

An embedded system is a computer system designed for specific control functions within a larger system. often with real-time computing constraints. It is embedded as part of a complete device often including hardware and mechanical parts. By contrast, a general-purpose computer, such as a personal...

s. Based in Bristol

Bristol

Bristol is a city, unitary authority area and ceremonial county in South West England, with an estimated population of 433,100 for the unitary authority in 2009, and a surrounding Larger Urban Zone with an estimated 1,070,000 residents in 2007...

, UK

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

, the company has been selling its processors since 2005. Its current 192-core CSX700 processor was released in 2008, but a lack of sales has forced the company to down size and it has since delisted from the London stock exchange. The company continues to offer its products and technology.

Products

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

Arithmetic logic unit

In computing, an arithmetic logic unit is a digital circuit that performs arithmetic and logical operations.The ALU is a fundamental building block of the central processing unit of a computer, and even the simplest microprocessors contain one for purposes such as maintaining timers...

, and a 16-bit integer multiply–accumulate unit. It currently sells its CSX700 processor on a PCI Express

PCI Express

PCI Express , officially abbreviated as PCIe, is a computer expansion card standard designed to replace the older PCI, PCI-X, and AGP bus standards...

 expansion card with 2 GB of memory, called the Advance e710. The card is supplied with the ClearSpeed Software Development Kit and application libraries.

Related multi-core architectures include Ambric

Ambric

Ambric-architecture processors, are developed and marketed by a division of Nethra, a fabless semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, California. Nethra purchased the Ambric technology in early 2009. Ambric the company was founded in 2003 and the current team, all from the original startup,...

, PicoChip

PicoChip

Picochip is a venture-backed fabless semiconductor company based in Bath, England, founded in 2000.The company is active in two areas, with two distinct product families.-Multi-core DSP:...

, Cell BE

Cell microprocessor

Cell is a microprocessor architecture jointly developed by Sony, Sony Computer Entertainment, Toshiba, and IBM, an alliance known as "STI". The architectural design and first implementation were carried out at the STI Design Center in Austin, Texas over a four-year period beginning March 2001 on a...

, Texas Memory Systems

Texas Memory Systems

Texas Memory Systems, Inc. is a privately held American corporation that designs and manufacturers solid-state disks and digital signal processors . TMS was founded in 1978 and that same year introduced their first solid-state drive, followed by their first digital signal processor...

, and GPGPU

GPGPU

General-purpose computing on graphics processing units is the technique of using a GPU, which typically handles computation only for computer graphics, to perform computation in applications traditionally handled by the CPU...

 stream processors

Stream processing

Stream processing is a computer programming paradigm, related to SIMD , that allows some applications to more easily exploit a limited form of parallel processing...

 such as AMD FireStream

AMD FireStream

The AMD FireStream is a stream processor produced by Advanced Micro Devices to utilize the stream processing/GPGPU concept for heavy floating-point computations to target various industries, such as the High Performance Computing , scientific, and financial sectors...

 and Nvidia Tesla

Nvidia Tesla

The Tesla graphics processing unit is nVidia's third brand of GPUs. It is based on high-end GPUs from the G80 , as well as the Quadro lineup. Tesla is nVidia's first dedicated General Purpose GPU...

. ClearSpeed competes with AMD and Nvidia in the hardware acceleration

Hardware acceleration

In computing, Hardware acceleration is the use of computer hardware to perform some function faster than is possible in software running on the general-purpose CPU...

 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.

History

• In November 2003 ClearSpeed demonstrated the CS301, with 64 processing elements running at 200 MHz.
• In June 2005 ClearSpeed demonstrated the CSX600, with 96 processing elements running at 210 MHz, capable of 40 GFLOPS.
• In September 2005 John Gustafson
  John Gustafson (scientist)
  John L. Gustafson is an American computer scientist and businessman, chiefly known for his work in High Performance Computing such as the invention of Gustafson's Law, introducing the first commercial computer cluster, measuring with QUIPS, leading the reconstruction of the Atanasoff–Berry...
  
   joined ClearSpeed as CTO of high performance computing.
• In November 2005 ClearSpeed made its first significant sale of CSX600 processors to the Tokyo Institute of Technology
  Tokyo Institute of Technology
  The Tokyo Institute of Technology is a public research university located in Greater Tokyo Area, Japan. Tokyo Tech is the largest institution for higher education in Japan dedicated to science and technology. Tokyo Tech enrolled 4,850 undergaraduates and 5006 graduate students for 2009-2010...
  
   using X620 Advance cards.
• In November 2006 ClearSpeed X620 Advance cards helped place the Tsubame cluster 7th in the TOP500
  TOP500
  The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful known computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year...
  
   list of supercomputers. The cards continue to be used in 2009.
• In September 2007 ClearSpeed licensed its next generation processor to BAE Systems for inclusion in satellite systems.
• In February 2007 ClearSpeed raised £20 million in share placing on the AIM market.
• In June 2008 ClearSpeed released the CSX700, combining two CSX600 devices with a PCI Express x16 interface and ECC on all memories, using a lower power 90 nm process. The device delivers 96 GFLOPS for 9 watts with 192 processing elements running at 250 MHz. The device was also released on the Advance e710 card at the same time.
• In February 2009 ClearSpeed announced a cost-cutting programme following poor financial results for 2008.
• In July 2009 ClearSpeed delisted from the London Stock Exchange
  London Stock Exchange
  The London Stock Exchange is a stock exchange located in the City of London within the United Kingdom. , the Exchange had a market capitalisation of US$3.7495 trillion, making it the fourth-largest stock exchange in the world by this measurement...
  
  and returned £6.9 million to its shareholders.
• In August 2009 ClearSpeed made its most significant sale through high performance and heterogeneous compute specialists PetaPath.