Adapteva Supercomputer For Mobile Phones Could Power Future Game Consoles

The processors and APUs inside our smartphones and other mobile devices are getting faster with each generation. The computing power in these small devices is far beyond what you could have in many computers when I was a kid. A company called Adapteva has pitched a new chip for smartphones and other devices that has many more cores inside than the two that processors in some smartphones in use today.

The design that Adapteva is showing off has 64-cores and will sit inside a device like a tablet or a smartphone and offload the work from the APU or GPU. That will allow the devices to do more work on the gadget rather than sending that data over WiFi or data connections to be processed elsewhere. One of the key features of the Adapteva chip needs only a single watt of power to operate. The less power the chip needs to operate the longer the battery inside the device can run.

The design can be scaled up for other uses all the way to 4,096 cores, which would need 64W to operate. However, it will be pushed for gadgets like smartphones and others to start. Another key feature of the Adapteva 64-core processor in the smartphone is that it is very small at 8mm square. That small size will make it easy to package inside the thin and portable gadgets popular today. Other than game consoles and smartphones, the chip also has potential uses for speech and facial recognition.

[via Gigaom]