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,ClearSpeed Releases New Advance e710 Accelerator Board and CSX700 Processor but a lack of sales has forced the company to downsizeClearSpeed sees CEO resign as cost-cutting starts and it has since delisted from the London stock exchange.Osborne Clarke advises ClearSpeed on tender offerClearSpeed shareholder communications
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.CSX700 specification 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.ClearSpeed SDK
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.ClearSpeed Squeezes 96 GFlops Out Of 12 Watts
History In November 2003 ClearSpeed demonstrated the CS301, with 64 processing elements running at 200 MHz,ClearSpeed demonstrates working silicon of parallel processor // EETimes and peak 25.6 FP32 GFLOPS.Presentation about ClearSpeed Architecture In June 2005 ClearSpeed demonstrated the CSX600, with 96 processing elements running at 210 MHz, capable of 40 GFLOPS.ClearSpeed demonstrates 64-bit FP coprocessor // EETimes In September 2005 John Gustafson 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 using X620 Advance cards. In November 2006 ClearSpeed X620 Advance cards helped place the Tsubame cluster 7th in the TOP500 list of supercomputers.TSUBAME Grid Cluster 7th in the TOP500 The cards continue to be used in 2009.Massive Supercomputing - Coping with Heterogeneity of Modern Accelerators In September 2007 ClearSpeed licensed its next generation processor to BAE Systems for inclusion in satellite systems.BAE Systems Licenses ClearSpeed’s Next Generation Processor // EDA Geek, 2007 In February 2007 ClearSpeed raised £20 million in share placing on the AIM market.ClearSpeed set to raise £20 million in share placing // EETimes 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 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.
References
External links ClearSpeed Official site (seem defunct / not working URL.) https://books.google.com/books?id=bAeFGuNtGOAC&pg=PA105&dq=ClearSpeed