Intel absorbs the developer of ARM chips - the company ZiiLabs
Intel announced a deal with Creative Technology to acquire for $ 50 million ZiiLabs, a subsidiary of Creative Technology, developing ZMS-40 and ZMS-20 multi-core ARM chips, which have been used in various Android devices: tablets , media players such as Creative Zii Egg and other devices.
ZiiLabs is known for introducing the 100-core ZMS-40 SoC chip in January 2012. And in the mobile device market, ZiiLabs GPU solutions compete with PowerVR graphics chips developed by Imagination Technologies.
According to the terms of the agreement, out of $ 50 million, about 30 million are paid for fixed assets and engineering resources of ZiiLabs, and the rest for patents and licenses for ZiiLabs GPU technologies.
The latest development of ZiiLabs, the 100-core ZMS-40 SoC chip, combines a 4-core 1.5 GHz ARM Cortex-A9 processor (with Neon multimedia blocks) and an array of 96 simpler and less universal StemCell computing cores.
StemCell cores are SIMD energy efficient architecture, peak performance in floating point calculations (32 bits) is 50 GFLOPS, whose cores work as a GPU and can be used to process video, images and audio, to accelerate 3D and 2D graphics and other multimedia tasks (supported by OpenGL ES 2.0 and OpenCL 1.1) - see the article: “ZiiLabs introduced the 4 + 96-core ZMS-40 processor” .
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Previously, Intel, as an embedded GPU for desktop processors, used PowerVR technology developed by Imagination Technologies and tried to release its discrete GPU accelerator on the Intel x86 command architecture — the well-known Intel Larrabee project, which degenerated into the Intel Many Integrated Core architecture (Intel MIC). Recently, 60 Intel Xeon Phi nuclear co-processors (see: “Intel Xeon Phi 5110P Co-Processor” ) were introduced , reaching peak performance in double-precision calculations in 1 TFLOPS.
In general, today Intel is showing great interest in developing multi-core processors in which it wants to use 100 cores, and first of all these multi-core processors will be aimed specifically at the server market (where the Xeon Phi coprocessor is today and where supercomputers now most often use GPGPU- Accelerators such as NVIDIA Tesla K20 or AMD FirePro S10000), and it is obvious that the architecture of Intel x86 commands does not suit this much. Likely for this reason Intel decided to use innovative developments and patents of the ZiiLabs company.
A lot of questions arise, for which Intel needed an array of StemCell cores from ZiiLabs:
1. Will Intel use ARM cores in its future multi-core processors with ZiiLabs technologies (as in the ZMS-40) or will it replace them with its Intel x86 cores?
2. In general, will ZiiLabs development for conventional desktop processors be used as an integrated GPU accelerator, or will they leave exclusively to develop super-parallel multi-core processors for GPGPU computing (such as Xeon Phi) for the server market?
3. Or maybe AMD’s approach to creating AMD Fusion architecture turned out to be correct and now Intel decided to develop its own APU (Accelerated Processing Unit) in which it will use modern Intel Core iX + array of StemCell cores from ZiiLabs? As a result, soon discrete GPU accelerators will not be needed for desktop computers at all.
4. Or maybe Intel will still decide using the development of ZiiLabs to release its own discrete GPU accelerator competing with discrete GPUs from NVidia and AMD?
What do you think about that?
Links to the discussed news:
* "Intel buys British $ ZiiLabs for $ 50 million" ;
* Website of ZiiLABS Inc.
ZiiLabs is known for introducing the 100-core ZMS-40 SoC chip in January 2012. And in the mobile device market, ZiiLabs GPU solutions compete with PowerVR graphics chips developed by Imagination Technologies.
According to the terms of the agreement, out of $ 50 million, about 30 million are paid for fixed assets and engineering resources of ZiiLabs, and the rest for patents and licenses for ZiiLabs GPU technologies.
The latest development of ZiiLabs, the 100-core ZMS-40 SoC chip, combines a 4-core 1.5 GHz ARM Cortex-A9 processor (with Neon multimedia blocks) and an array of 96 simpler and less universal StemCell computing cores.
StemCell cores are SIMD energy efficient architecture, peak performance in floating point calculations (32 bits) is 50 GFLOPS, whose cores work as a GPU and can be used to process video, images and audio, to accelerate 3D and 2D graphics and other multimedia tasks (supported by OpenGL ES 2.0 and OpenCL 1.1) - see the article: “ZiiLabs introduced the 4 + 96-core ZMS-40 processor” .
')
Previously, Intel, as an embedded GPU for desktop processors, used PowerVR technology developed by Imagination Technologies and tried to release its discrete GPU accelerator on the Intel x86 command architecture — the well-known Intel Larrabee project, which degenerated into the Intel Many Integrated Core architecture (Intel MIC). Recently, 60 Intel Xeon Phi nuclear co-processors (see: “Intel Xeon Phi 5110P Co-Processor” ) were introduced , reaching peak performance in double-precision calculations in 1 TFLOPS.
In general, today Intel is showing great interest in developing multi-core processors in which it wants to use 100 cores, and first of all these multi-core processors will be aimed specifically at the server market (where the Xeon Phi coprocessor is today and where supercomputers now most often use GPGPU- Accelerators such as NVIDIA Tesla K20 or AMD FirePro S10000), and it is obvious that the architecture of Intel x86 commands does not suit this much. Likely for this reason Intel decided to use innovative developments and patents of the ZiiLabs company.
A lot of questions arise, for which Intel needed an array of StemCell cores from ZiiLabs:
1. Will Intel use ARM cores in its future multi-core processors with ZiiLabs technologies (as in the ZMS-40) or will it replace them with its Intel x86 cores?
2. In general, will ZiiLabs development for conventional desktop processors be used as an integrated GPU accelerator, or will they leave exclusively to develop super-parallel multi-core processors for GPGPU computing (such as Xeon Phi) for the server market?
3. Or maybe AMD’s approach to creating AMD Fusion architecture turned out to be correct and now Intel decided to develop its own APU (Accelerated Processing Unit) in which it will use modern Intel Core iX + array of StemCell cores from ZiiLabs? As a result, soon discrete GPU accelerators will not be needed for desktop computers at all.
4. Or maybe Intel will still decide using the development of ZiiLabs to release its own discrete GPU accelerator competing with discrete GPUs from NVidia and AMD?
What do you think about that?
Links to the discussed news:
* "Intel buys British $ ZiiLabs for $ 50 million" ;
* Website of ZiiLABS Inc.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/159665/
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