 | |
| Company type | Société Anonyme |
|---|---|
| Industry | Semiconductors |
| Founded | 27 August 2008 [1] |
| Headquarters | , |
Key people | Eric Baissus (CEO) |
| Products | Many-core processor |
| Website | www |
Kalray is a French fabless semiconductor company headquartered in Montbonnot, France.
Kalray was founded in 2008 as a spin-off of CEA French lab, with investors such as Renault–Nissan–Mitsubishi Alliance, Safran, NXP Semiconductors, CEA and Bpifrance. [2] [3]
In April 2020, Kalray announced an $8 million investment from NXP which allows them to be able to develop various solutions for autonomous driving together. [4] [5]
In January 2022, Kalray negotiated with arcapix Holdings Ltd. for their acquisition. Arcapix is the parent company of pixitmedia and arcastream. [6] [7] At the Flash Memory Summit Awards (FMS) in August 2022, Kalray was awarded the Most Innovative Technology award for their Flashbox. [8] [9] In May 2023, the IP-CUBE project that is led by Kalray won the "Technological Maturation and Demonstration of Embedded Artificial Intelligence Solutions" label under the "France Relance 2030 – Future Investments" plan. [10] [11]
The first Kalray patent was filed in 2010. Today the company holds more than 30 patent families, [12] including 2 families with an exclusive CEA license.
On 22 June 2015, Kalray began the distribution of data center acceleration board families: TurboCard and KONIC, [13] for networking and storage applications, both of which can be programmed with either standard C or C++. [14] TurboCard and KONIC both utilize the MPPA2-256 Bostan second generation processor.
In January 2019, Kalray and NXP began a partnership for new platforms for automated driving. The Massively Parallel Processor Array (MPPA) chips from Kalrey together with the two NXP chips will be used in the new BlueBox 2.0. [15] Together with Wistron, Kalray launched the FURIO1200 storage system in January 2021. [16] [17] The K200-LP accelerator card was launched in June 2021. [18]
Kalray chips are code-named after Mountains. However each chip is called a "MPPA" for "massively parallel processor array":
Produced in 2013 in CMOS 28HP technology from TSMC, this SoC (or System-on-Chip) runs at 400 MHz and contains 256 VLIW processing cores.
Produced in 2015 with the same CMOS 28HP technology from TSMC, this SoC running at 550 MHz was enhanced to increase the floating-point performance of the VLIW cores, to natively support the Linux operating system, and to process high-speed Ethernet (up to 80 Gbit/s). Each VLIW core was extended with a tightly coupled cryptographic coprocessor for security protocol acceleration.
Produced in 2017, this processor is based on the previous generation, Bostan, with an improved DDR controller, Ethernet controller and PCIe controller. As a result, this processor fully supports the NVM Express (NVMe) standard interface (for connecting hosts to PCIe bus-attached SSDs), and also the NVMe over Fabrics standard using RDMA (for connections between servers, storage controllers, and NVMe enclosures).
The third-generation MPPA processor Coolidge has been released. [19] Based on TSMC 16 nm FinFET process technology, this processor includes 80 64-bit VLIW processing cores distributed among 5 clusters, 8x 25 Gbit/s Ethernet and 16x PCIe Gen4 interfaces. Each VLIW core is extended with a tightly coupled tensor co-processor for deep learning application acceleration. [20]
In 2017, ahead of the launch of Kalray's third-generation microprocessor, Safran [21] and Pengpai joined the company's historical investors (mainly CEA Investissement, ACE, INOCAP). [22] In 2018, Alliance Ventures (strategic venture capital fund operated by Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi) and Definvest (an investment fund managed by Bpifrance on behalf of the French Ministry of Armed Forces) also acquired stakes in Kalray. [23]
On June 12, 2018, Kalray launched its IPO on the Euronext Paris Stock Market [24] and raised €47.7M (after exercise of the over-allocation option), "the most significant IPO since Euronext Growth was created in Paris." [25]
STMicroelectronics N.V. is a multinational corporation and technology company of French-Italian origin. It is headquartered in Plan-les-Ouates and listed on the New York Stock Exchange, on the Euronext Paris in Paris and on the Borsa Italiana in Milan. ST is the largest European semiconductor contract manufacturing and design company. The company resulted from the merger of two government-owned semiconductor companies in 1987: Thomson Semiconducteurs of France and SGS Microelettronica of Italy.
The southbridge is one of the two chips in the core logic chipset on older personal computer (PC) motherboards, the other being the northbridge. As of 2023, most personal computer devices no longer use a set of two chips, and instead have a single chip acting as the 'chipset', for example Intel's Z790 chipset.
Marvell Technology, Inc. is an American company, headquartered in Wilmington, Delaware, which develops and produces semiconductors and related technology. Founded in 1995, the company had more than 7,000 employees as of 2023, with over 10,000 patents worldwide, and an annual revenue of $5.9 billion for fiscal 2023.
A solid-state drive (SSD) is a solid-state storage device that uses integrated circuit assemblies to store data persistently, typically using flash memory, and functions as secondary storage in the hierarchy of computer storage. It is also sometimes called a semiconductor storage device, a solid-state device, or a solid-state disk, even though SSDs lack the physical spinning disks and movable read-write heads used in hard disk drives (HDDs) and floppy disks. SSD also has rich internal parallelism for data processing.
Phison Electronics Corporation is a Taiwanese public electronics company that primarily designs, manufactures and sells controllers for NAND flash memory chips. These are integrated into flash-based products such as USB flash drives, memory cards, and solid-state drives (SSDs).
Titan was a planned family of 32-bit Power ISA-based microprocessor cores designed by Applied Micro Circuits Corporation (AMCC), but was scrapped in 2010. Applied Micro chose to continue development of the PowerPC 400 core instead, on a 40 nm fabrication process.
JMicron Technology Corporation is a Taiwan based fabless technology design house based in Hsinchu, Taiwan. As a manufacturer of integrated circuits, they produce controller chips for bridge devices.
QorIQ is a brand of ARM-based and Power ISA–based communications microprocessors from NXP Semiconductors. It is the evolutionary step from the PowerQUICC platform, and initial products were built around one or more e500mc cores and came in five different product platforms, P1, P2, P3, P4, and P5, segmented by performance and functionality. The platform keeps software compatibility with older PowerPC products such as the PowerQUICC platform. In 2012 Freescale announced ARM-based QorIQ offerings beginning in 2013.
TILE-Gx was a VLIW ISA multicore processor family designed by Tilera. It consisted of a mesh network that was expected to scale up to 100 cores, but only 72-core variants actually shipped.
TILEPro64 is a VLIW ISA multicore processor manufactured by Tilera. It consists of a cache-coherent mesh network of 64 "tiles", where each tile houses a general purpose processor, cache, and a non-blocking router, which the tile uses to communicate with the other tiles on the processor.
NVM Express (NVMe) or Non-Volatile Memory Host Controller Interface Specification (NVMHCIS) is an open, logical-device interface specification for accessing a computer's non-volatile storage media usually attached via the PCI Express bus. The initial NVM stands for non-volatile memory, which is often NAND flash memory that comes in several physical form factors, including solid-state drives (SSDs), PCIe add-in cards, and M.2 cards, the successor to mSATA cards. NVM Express, as a logical-device interface, has been designed to capitalize on the low latency and internal parallelism of solid-state storage devices.
Achronix Semiconductor Corporation is an American fabless semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, California with an additional R&D facility in Bangalore, India, and an additional sales office in Shenzhen, China. Achronix is a diversified fabless semiconductor company that sells FPGA products, embedded FPGA (eFPGA) products, system-level products and supporting design tools. Achronix was founded in 2004 in Ithaca, New York based on technology licensed from Cornell University. In 2006, Achronix moved its headquarters to Silicon Valley.
The OpenDataPlane (ODP) is an open-source project which defines application programming interfaces (APIs) for portable high performance networking data plane applications. ODP API design enables various implementation strategies without exposing the application to implementation details. This allows the same application (source code or binary) to run efficiently on various hardware platforms with different levels of HW acceleration. For example, the same application source code may be re-compiled to run on a standard server system or a specialized networking System on a Chip (SoC) device.
3D XPoint is a discontinued non-volatile memory (NVM) technology developed jointly by Intel and Micron Technology. It was announced in July 2015 and was available on the open market under the brand name Optane (Intel) from April 2017 to July 2022. Bit storage is based on a change of bulk resistance, in conjunction with a stackable cross-grid data access array. Initial prices are less than dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) but more than flash memory.
The Apple A9 is a 64-bit ARM-based system-on-chip (SoC), designed by Apple Inc. Manufactured for Apple by both TSMC and Samsung, it first appeared in the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus which were introduced on September 9, 2015. Apple states that it has 70% more CPU performance and 90% more graphics performance compared to its predecessor, the Apple A8. On September 12, 2018, the iPhone 6S and iPhone 6S Plus along with the first-generation iPhone SE was discontinued, ending production of A9 chips. The latest software updates for the iPhone 6S & 6S Plus including the iPhone SE 1st generation variants systems using this chip are iOS 15.7.9, released on September 12, 2023 as they were discontinued with the release of iOS 16 in 2022, and for the iPad 5th generation using this chip was iPadOS 16.7, released on May 18, 2023, as it was discontinued with the release of iPadOS 17 in 2023.
The Apple A9X is a 64-bit ARM architecture-based system on a chip (SoC) designed by Apple Inc. It first appeared in the iPad Pro, which was announced on September 9, 2015 and was released on November 11, 2015. The A9X has the M9 motion coprocessor embedded in it, something not seen in previous chip generations. It is a variant of the A9 and Apple claims that it has 80% more CPU performance and twice the GPU performance of its predecessor, the A8X.
IBM FlashCore Modules (FCM) are solid state technology computer data storage modules using PCI Express attachment and the NVMe command set. They are offered as an alternative to industry-standard 2.5" NVMe SSDs in selected arrays from the IBM FlashSystem family, with raw storage capacities of 4.8 TB, 9.6 TB, 19.2 TB and 38.4 TB. FlashCore modules support hardware self-encryption and real-time inline hardware data compression up to 115.2 TB address space, without performance impact.
Ampere Computing LLC is an American fabless semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, California that develops processors for servers operating in large scale environments. Ampere also has offices in: Portland, Oregon; Taipei, Taiwan; Raleigh, North Carolina; Bangalore, India; Warsaw, Poland; and Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.