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. 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.
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, and a 16-bit integer multiply–accumulate unit. It currently sells its CSX700 processor on a PCI Expressexpansion 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, PicoChip, Cell BE, Texas Memory Systems, and GPGPUstream 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.
History
In November 2003 ClearSpeed demonstrated the CS301, with 64 processing elements running at 200 MHz, and peak 25.6 FP32 GFLOPS.
In June 2005 ClearSpeed demonstrated the CSX600, with 96 processing elements running at 210 MHz, capable of 40 GFLOPS.
In November 2005 ClearSpeed made its first significant sale of CSX600 processors to the Tokyo Institute of Technology using X620 Advance cards.
In November 2006 ClearSpeed X620 Advance cards helped place the Tsubame cluster 7th in the TOP500list of supercomputers. The cards continue to be used in 2009.
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.
