SiCortex Teams with eSilicon for HPC System on a Chip

By DE Editors

eSilicon Corporation (Sunnyvale, CA) announced an engagement with SiCortex (Maynard, MA), a high-performance computing (HPC) company, to enable SiCortex to introduce a series of products capable of up to 6 teraflops performance with low-power operating characteristics.

The two companies worked together on the design and manufacture of a complete HPC system on a chip, a highly integrated device with more than 350 million transistors. (The partnership resulted in a 20-month design-to-tape out cycle, saving SiCortex time, resources, and capital in introducing its debut product line.)

SiCortex has introduced the first computer architecture to recognize that high-sustained performance and low power are synergistic, not antagonistic. To realize this vision, SiCortex worked with eSilicon to put a complete cluster node on a single chip, eliminating the enormous heat output that causes serious reliability, performance, and operating cost problems in clusters that rely on existing CPUs.

During the development phase, eSilicon worked with the SiCortex team on design elements and processes, including the development and integration of DDR2 Phy IP blocks. eSilicon also performed the design-for-testability (DFT) planning and implementation, and managed the handoff and logistics of working with the foundry.

The release states that SC5832 is the first and only computer system that offers 5832 64-bit processors, each dissipating just 600 milliwatts (mW) of power, on a single backplane. Six processors are mounted on a single chip, along with all inter-processor communications logic plus two DDR-2 memory controllers and PCI Express I/O logic.

Complete with its 8 Terabytes of system memory, the system fits in a single cabinet and requires less than 20kW of wall power.

For further details, contact eSilicon or SiCortex.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.