Adapteva has announced their new Epiphany IV chip that packs 64 cores and is designed to work as a co-processor for smartphones and tablets. The new chip can provide 70 gigaflops of performance and consume less than one watt of power. The chip cannot host a full OS, as it’s not a general purpose CPU. But is intended to be a co-processor to take processing load off the CPU.

“The Epiphany IV chip packs 64 cores, and can provide 70 gigaflops of performance while consuming one watt of power,” said Andreas Olofsson, Adapteva's CEO. “A watt may be high for smartphones, but performance and power consumed by the cores can be scaled down to accelerate tasks such as hand-gesture recognition and face recognition. We're not trying to take on Intel or ARM, we're trying to sit next to it.”

Epiphany IV has a mesh design with parallel cores for multi-point and faster exchange of data. Cores can be easily added to scale performance, and the multiple communication points help resolve bandwidth issues. Each RISC (reduced instruction set computing) core consumes up to 25 milliwatts of power at peak performance and the chip can be designed to have 8 to 64 cores depending on design, power and performance requirement.

The chip will be made using 28-nanometer process and is small enough to fit inside a system-on-chip for smartphones, which combines the CPU with other processors like graphics and audio. The new chip could increase the performance of a smartphone chip by 10 times especially for parallel tasks. The 64-core reference design of Epiphany IV will be available in the first quarter of 2012.