Ambric, Inc. was a designer of computer processors that developed the Ambric architecture. Its Am2045Massively Parallel Processor Array (MPPA)chips were primarily used in high-performanceembedded systems such as medical imaging, video, and signal-processing.
Ambric was founded in 2003 inBeaverton, Oregon by Jay Eisenlohr and Anthony Mark Jones. Eisenlohr previously founded andsold Rendition, Inc. to Micron Technology[dead link] 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-foundedVitek 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 thefinancial crisis of 2007–2008. Ambric's Am2045 and tools remained available throughNethra Imaging, Inc.,[1] which closed in 2012.
Ambricarchitecture is a massively paralleldistributed memorymultiprocessor, based on the Structural ObjectProgramming Model.[2][3] Each processor is programmed in conventionalJava (a strict subset) and/orassembly code. The hundreds of processors on the chip send data and control messages to one another through an interconnect ofreconfigurable, self-synchronizingchannels, which provide both communication andsynchronization.[4] Themodel of computation is very similar to aKahn process network with boundedbuffers.
The Am2045 device has 336 32-bitRISC-DSP fixed-point processors and 336 2-kibibyte memories, which run at up to 300 MHz.[5] It has anEclipse-basedintegrated development environment including editor, compiler, assemblers, simulator, configuration generator, source-codedebugger and video/image-processing, signal-processing, and video-codec libraries.
The Am2045 delivers 1 TeraOPS (OperationsPerSecond)[6] and 50 Giga-MACs (Multply-Accumulates per second) of fixed-point processing with 6-12W of power consumed (dependent on the application).
Ambric's MPPA devices were used for high-definition, 2K and 4Kvideo compression,transcoding and analysis,image recognition,medical imaging, signal-processing,software defined radio and other compute-intensivestreaming media applications,[7] which otherwise would useFPGA,DSP and/orASIC chips. The company claimed advantages such as higher performance andenergy efficiency,scalability, higher productivity due tosoftware programming rather thanhardware design, andoff-the-shelf availability.
Video codec libraries were available for a variety of professional camera and video editing formats such asDVCPRO HD,VC-3 (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 singleATCA chassis.[8]
OtherMPPAs includepicoChip andIntellaSys, and theUC Davis'sAsAP research chip. Companies that offer or offered products classified asmanycore (a related classification) devices includeAspex Semiconductor,Cavium,ClearSpeed,Coherent Logix,SPI, andTilera. The more established processor companies,Texas Instruments andFreescale, offermulticore products, but with a lower number of processors (typically 3–8) and use traditional shared-memory, timing-sensitive programming models.
Microprocessor Report 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".[9]
In 2013, Ambric architecture received the Top 20 award from theIEEE 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.[10]