Ambric, Inc. was a designer of computer processors that developed the Ambric architecture. Its Am2045

Massively Parallel Processor Array A massively parallel processor array, also known as a multi purpose processor array (MPPA) is a type of integrated circuit which has a massively parallel array of hundreds or thousands of CPUs and RAM memories. These processors pass work to one an ...

(MPPA)

chips ''CHiPs'' is an American crime drama television series created by Rick Rosner and originally aired on NBC from September 15, 1977, to May 1, 1983. It follows the lives of two motorcycle officers of the California Highway Patrol (CHP). The seri ...

were primarily used in high-performance

embedded systems An embedded system is a computer system—a combination of a computer processor, computer memory, and input/output peripheral devices—that has a dedicated function within a larger mechanical or electronic system. It is ''embedded'' ...

such as medical imaging, video, and signal-processing. Ambric was founded in 2003 in Beaverton, Oregon by Jay Eisenlohr and Anthony Mark Jones. Eisenlohr previously founded an
sold Rendition, Inc. to Micron Technology
for $93M, while Jones is a leading expert in analog, digital, and system IC design and is the named inventor on over 120 U.S. patents. Jones was also the founder of a number of companies prior to Ambric, and has since co-founde
Vitek IP
with technology and patent expert Dan Buri in 2019. Ambric developed and introduced the Am2045 and its software tools in 2007, but fell victim to the

financial crisis of 2007–2008 Finance is the study and discipline of money, currency and capital assets. It is related to, but not synonymous with economics, the study of production, distribution, and consumption of money, assets, goods and services (the discipline of fi ...

. Ambric's Am2045 and tools remained available through Nethra Imaging, Inc., which closed in 2012.

Architecture and programming model

Ambric

architecture Architecture is the art and technique of designing and building, as distinguished from the skills associated with construction. It is both the process and the product of sketching, conceiving, planning, designing, and constructing building ...

is a massively parallel

distributed memory In computer science, distributed memory refers to a multiprocessor computer system in which each processor has its own private memory. Computational tasks can only operate on local data, and if remote data are required, the computational task mu ...

multiprocessor Multiprocessing is the use of two or more central processing units (CPUs) within a single computer system. The term also refers to the ability of a system to support more than one processor or the ability to allocate tasks between them. There ar ...

, based on the Structural Object Programming Model. Each processor is programmed in conventional

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's mos ...

(a strict subset) and/or

assembly code In computer programming, assembly language (or assembler language, or symbolic machine code), often referred to simply as Assembly and commonly abbreviated as ASM or asm, is any low-level programming language with a very strong correspondence b ...

. The hundreds of processors on the chip send data and control messages to one another through an interconnect of reconfigurable, self-synchronizing

channels Channel, channels, channeling, etc., may refer to: Geography * Channel (geography), in physical geography, a landform consisting of the outline (banks) of the path of a narrow body of water. Australia * Channel Country, region of outback Austral ...

, which provide both communication and synchronization. The

model of computation In computer science, and more specifically in computability theory and computational complexity theory, a model of computation is a model which describes how an output of a mathematical function is computed given an input. A model describes how ...

is very similar to a

Kahn process network A Kahn process network (KPN, or process network) is a Distributed computing, distributed ''model of computation'' in which a group of deterministic sequential Process (computing), processes communicate through unbounded FIFO (computing and electron ...

with bounded buffers.

Devices and tools

The Am2045 device has 336 32-

bit The bit is the most basic unit of information in computing and digital communications. The name is a portmanteau of binary digit. The bit represents a logical state with one of two possible values. These values are most commonly represente ...

RISC- DSP fixed-point processors and 336 2-

kibibyte The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable uni ...

memories, which run at up to 300MHz. It has an Eclipse-based

integrated development environment An integrated development environment (IDE) is a software application that provides comprehensive facilities to computer programmers for software development. An IDE normally consists of at least a source code editor, build automation tools ...

including editor, compiler, assemblers, simulator, configuration generator, source-code

debugger A debugger or debugging tool is a computer program used to test and debug other programs (the "target" program). The main use of a debugger is to run the target program under controlled conditions that permit the programmer to track its executi ...

and video/image-processing, signal-processing, and video-codec libraries.

Power and performance

The Am2045 delivers 1 TeraOPS (Operations Per Second) and 50 Giga-MACs ( Multply-Accumulates per second) of fixed-point processing with 6-12W of power consumed (dependent on the application).

Applications

Ambric's MPPA devices were used for high-definition, 2K and 4K video compression,

transcoding Transcoding is the direct digital-to-digital conversion of one encoding to another, such as for video data files, audio files (e.g., MP3, WAV), or character encoding (e.g., UTF-8, ISO/IEC 8859). This is usually done in cases where a target d ...

and analysis,

image recognition Computer vision is an interdisciplinary scientific field that deals with how computers can gain high-level understanding from digital images or videos. From the perspective of engineering, it seeks to understand and automate tasks that the human ...

, medical imaging, signal-processing,

software defined radio Software-defined radio (SDR) is a radio communication system where components that have been traditionally implemented in analog hardware (e.g. mixers, filters, amplifiers, modulators/demodulators, detectors, etc.) are instead implemented by ...

and other compute-intensive streaming media applications, which otherwise would use FPGA, DSP and/or ASIC chips. The company claimed advantages such as higher performance and energy efficiency,

scalability Scalability is the property of a system to handle a growing amount of work by adding resources to the system. In an economic context, a scalable business model implies that a company can increase sales given increased resources. For example, a ...

, higher productivity due to software programming rather than

hardware design Processor design is a subfield of computer engineering and electronics engineering (fabrication) that deals with creating a processor, a key component of computer hardware. The design process involves choosing an instruction set and a certain exec ...

, and off-the-shelf availability. Video codec libraries were available for a variety of professional camera and video editing formats such as

DVCPRO HD DV refers to a family of codecs and videotape, tape formats used for storing digital video, launched in 1995 by a consortium of camcorder, video camera manufacturers led by Sony and Panasonic. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, DV was strongly ...

VC-3 Avid DNxHD ("Digital Nonlinear Extensible High Definition") is a lossy high-definition video post-production codec developed by Avid for multi-generation compositing with reduced storage and bandwidth requirements. It is an implementation of SMPTE ...

(DNxHD), AVC-Intra and others. An X-Ray customer system employs over 13,000 cores contained in 40 Am2045 chips, doing 3D reconstruction, in under 500W, in a single ATCA chassis.

Other MPPAs include picoChip and IntellaSys, and the UC Davis's AsAP research chip. Companies that offer or offered products classified as manycore (a related classification) devices include Aspex Semiconductor,

Cavium Cavium was a fabless semiconductor company based in San Jose, California, specializing in ARM-based and MIPS-based network, video and security processors and SoCs. The company was co-founded in 2000 by Syed B. Ali and M. Raghib Hussain, who w ...

, ClearSpeed, Coherent Logix, SPI, and Tilera. The more established processor companies,

Texas Instruments Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI) is an American technology company headquartered in Dallas, Texas, that designs and manufactures semiconductors and various integrated circuits, which it sells to electronics designers and manufacturers globa ...

and

Freescale Freescale Semiconductor, Inc. was an American semiconductor manufacturer. It was created by the divestiture of the Semiconductor Products Sector of Motorola in 2004. Freescale focused their integrated circuit products on the automotive, embedd ...

, offer multicore products, but with a lower number of processors (typically 3-8) and use traditional shared-memory, timing-sensitive programming models.

Recognition

Microprocessor Report ''Microprocessor Report'' is a newsletter covering the microprocessor industry. The publication is accessible only to paying subscribers. To avoid bias, it does not take advertisements. The publication provides extensive analysis of new high-perfo ...

gave a 2006 MPR Analysts' Choice Award for Innovation for the Ambric-architecture "for the design concept and architecture of its massively parallel processor, the Am2045". In 2013, Ambric architecture received the Top 20 award from the

IEEE The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is a 501(c)(3) professional association for electronic engineering and electrical engineering (and associated disciplines) with its corporate office in New York City and its operat ...

International Symposium on Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines, recognizing it as one of the 20 most significant publications in the 20-year history of the conference.FCCM20 Endorsement of "A Structural Object Programming Model, Architecture, Chip and Tools for Reconfigurable Computing", April 201

/ref>

References

{{Reflist

External links

Ambric website, May 12, 2008, at the Wayback Machine
Electronics companies established in 2003 Electronics companies disestablished in 2008 Massively parallel computers Digital signal processors Reconfigurable computing Fabless semiconductor companies Companies based in Beaverton, Oregon 2003 establishments in Oregon 2008 disestablishments in Oregon Semiconductor companies of the United States