Almost two weeks in, Adapteva, which is trying to bring an alternative chip architecture to the masses, is only a third of the way toward its funding goal. Xi3, a rethink of computer motherboard and chassis design, has raised only $27,468 of $250,000 with 18 days also left to go. Meanwhile, projects associated with the Internet of Things have topped their goals and other toy tech-related projects are also doing well.

Kickstarter can help niche hardware succeed

While this could easily turn into a piece wondering what type of hardware plays well with the Kickstarter crowd, I’m wondering how really geeky projects such as Adapteva’s 16 and 64-core supercomputer systems on a chip or even a slightly more consumer-friendly modular computer from Xi3 should use the platform. Perhaps Kickstarter CEO Perry Chen can share more on this when he speaks at our RoadMap conference on Nov. 5 in San Francisco.

The Adapteva Epiphany 16-core chip.

One could argue that both Adapteva and Xi3 are examples of Kickstarter fueling a niche market the big guys won’t touch, as a blog post by Robert Fabricant of Frog Design suggests, or that it is a last-ditch effort to succeed.

Fabricant wrote in his post “Kickstarter Rescues Startups That VCs Won’t Touch, But Here’s What’s Missing:”

Product design is governed by the laws of supply and demand. There is a tremendous supply of talent, yet very few products actually make it to market. So most designers have a huge stockpile of high-fidelity concepts and beautiful renderings gathering dust. While a number of these concepts turn up on Core77 and Co.Design, they have zero paths to market. Now you can argue that we don’t need another slab phone/pad with a slightly different chamfer or bezel. But there are a whole host of neglected device categories desperate for attention, like watches, bathroom scales, and thermostats. These devices feel woefully out of sync in an iProduct world. Perhaps the biggest service that Kickstarter has done is to reinvigorate these categories to the point where bigger players might see their potential and escape from “Slab Land.”

These projects fit in with Fabricant’s theme of Kickstarter being a good home for niche products that big vendors don’t want to touch or innovate, or even new chip architectures. Because of the large economies of scale required to get and keep the cost low enough, the computing world leaves a lot of room for smaller projects. The big challenge for the Xi3 guys and even Adapteva will be whether they can match their Kickstarter price to the market demand in a way that allows them to survive and innovate.

Forget funding, Kickstarter as a marketing platform

Namely, can Kickstarter generate the margins needed for a full-on production manufacturing schedule at smaller scale, or the margins to continue R&D for a chip? Does it have to? In the case of Xi3, the answer is a decided “No” David Politis, VP of marketing for the Salt Lake City-based Xi3, explains that the company decided to do a Kickstarter because it found the idea of crowdfunding so interesting, and it had a product to launch.

While Xi3′s Kickstarter project hasn’t been much of success from a fund-raising perspective, the company says it has gotten marketing benefits from the campaign. ”As campaigns go it has been successful,” said Politis. He says that people who have visited the project page and viewed the video are already ordering the computer from Xi3 rather than waiting for the project to close. “You have to ask at what point does a Kickstarter project become a media channel?” he said.

Xi3 has plans that go beyond its modular computer.

Adapteva and its Parallella project is in a different boat. It has turned to Kickstarter to build a market for its product after it couldn’t find continued venture-capital backing. It’s done well so far, but on Tuesday it also released its reference manuals, something CEO Andreas Olafsson said he wouldn’t do unless the project was successful. When asked if this was done to help generate more interest, a spokeswoman for Adapteva dodged the questions and said it was just something the company decided to do now.

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Given how anxious people are about the battery life on their mobile phones and how much more computing these devices are handling, one would think venture capital firms would rush to back Adapteva, which launched in May 2011. But Olofsson couldn’t find investors. He blames it on the reluctance of venture firms to back chip startups — and they certainly are leery of investing in capital-intensive hardware startups– but it could have been any number of reasons: bad business plan, a realization that handset makers weren’t going to swap out a Qualcomm application processor for an untried Adapteva option, or something else.

But instead of packing it in, Olofsson has turned to Kickstarter to bring his vision of supercomputer power in a tiny, low-power package to the market. He wants to sell a processor on a stripped-down board in two sizes as well as open source the software that will be needed to operate and program the chip. Called the Parallella project, the plan is to offer the 16-core board to those who pay $99 with the goal of raising $750,000. If the team can reach a stretch goal of $3 million it will also offer the 64-core version of its chip for $199.

Olofsson says he was inspired by the market and hobbyist community that’s building around Arduino boards and the Raspberry Pi, a low-power and low-cost computer. Earlier this month researchers at the University of Southampton made a supercomputer using LEGO bricks and Raspberry Pi modules. Olofsson acknowledged that project but pointed out that the Adapteva chip could deliver a lot more power — the 64-core version of his board delivers 51 gigahertz (compared to the 1.4 gigahertz processor inside the Samsung Galaxy 3) while consuming only five watts (that’s still a lot for a phone).

The Parallella boards will cost more however. Arduino boards or Raspberry Pi computers cost roughly $35 each as opposed to $99. But Oloffson is undaunted. He says researchers are already playing around with Adapteva chips for supercomputing and other projects, and aims to build a community. Kickstarter’s recent changes on how hardware companies will list their hardware caused minor launch snags for the Adapteva team, but nothing major.

In fact, the Kickstarter changes, which were designed to emphasize the funding nature of the platform instead of having people who backed products thinking of it more like a store, fit with Olofsson’s ideals. For him, bringing massively parallel computing to phones and other devices is a mission, not just a business.

“I feel like we have a better mousetrap here and yet the adoption has been very slow,” said Olofsson. ” And so we want to speed that up. As for the building a community, that’s our goal. We are talking a pretty scary step in opening our architecture. If this works we’re open sourcing and open licensing all of our SDKs. That’s the point of no return.”

Indeed. After raising a Series A of financing and taking on a convertible note to get to this point, Oloffson is betting his hopes on the Kickstarter community. There will be no Series B for Adapteva. In exchange for the community support, he’s stripped down his board and is opening up parts of his business that would be impossible for another chip company, where IP is everything. Make no mistake, this is a Hail Mary pass for his company, but it’s not one other chip startups could necessarily follow.

If Olofsson succeeds it may seem to be a new way of backing capital-intensive hardware firms, but in reality Adapteva spent $500,000 even getting the first version of its chips made. The military and its Series A strategic investor bore that cost, but declined to support the move beyond the $10,000 boards that are currently all Adapteva has to get people to embrace its new design. Let’s see if the Kickstarter community decides to give Adapteva and massively multicore parallel computing a whirl.

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Chips made using its technique have recently run at full speed but consumed half the power of their counterparts that use traditional transistors. This isn’t just a concern of a crazy startup; Intel recently unveiled a new process technology using 3-D transistors that is designed to save on power by helping chips continue to get smaller.

However, SuVolta’s process is pretty sweet because it uses the existing manufacturing tools already in place at the multi-billion semiconductor manufacturing plants, and because it should continue to work as designers shrink their chips. SuVolta also licenses some IP that gives designers a way to tweak their circuits to optimize the efficacy of the power-saving transistors.

It’s also designed to work best for systems on a chip, which are clusters of different processors integrated on one piece of silicon. In PCs and servers, a single or multi-core CPU was the ideal design choice, but for mobile devices and consumer products, integrating a bunch of different types of cores on a single chip has won out because it saves on space and power. This is why I listed SuVolta one of the three startups that showcase the future of chips.

And saving on space and power is the name of the game as devices go mobile and energy becomes a huge issue, either because of battery life or because power generation has become such a limiting factor in the data center. In fact, many of the chip companies that have managed to raise money in the last two or three years are working to reduce power either through some new process or through using new architectures to perform work more efficiently. Companies such as Adapteva, which is using a different architecture to deliver performance with less power in supercomputers and phones; Calxeda, which is trying to use ARM-based chips for low-power servers; and Lyric Semiconductor, which is focused on a new type of computing, all have raised money in the last few years.

But to show how rare such capital-intensive chip deals are, SuVolta pulled together this infographic to drive it home. As a chip reporter who once covered the bubble years when chip startups were a dime a dozen, I live this shrinkage, because there are fewer pitches and fun stories to write, but this makes it easy for everyone to see what’s going on.

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Servers? We don't need no stinkin' servers!

Both mobile and high-performance computing are placing huge power efficiency and performance demands on chips, but the $64,000-question is how long until such extreme computing use cases hit the server mainstream. Asked another way, the question becomes, how long until Amazon Web Services adopts ARM-based servers?

Or perhaps it isn’t ARM-based servers, but a variation on an Intel chip that takes its architecture from some of the more innovative and energy-efficient silicon out today. For example, Adapteva, a startup I profiled back in May, released a 64-core chip on Monday that can deliver 70 gigaflops of performance per watt. If you don’t speak gigaflops, that’s okay: It basically has done what Intel and certain countries have deemed impossible with the current generation of silicon.

The government of the European Union, in its quest for an exascale supercomputer, has targeted a goal of getting 50 gigaflops per watt (Intel also thinks this would work). In conversations with folks that design supercomputers, the thinking is that a conventional x86-based machine would require the equivalent of a power plant or two to run. That includes all the networking and other trimmings, but the bottom line is that Adapteva’s chips deliver more flops per watt, and that’s a good thing.

It’s not just supercomputers though. Adapteva’s CEO Andreas Olofsson told me the company is only targeting computing extremes such as supercomputing and mobile phones because that’s where the power efficiency pain point is today. Because mobile phones run on batteries, and no one wants a smartphone that dies after two hours, vendors using ARM’s power-efficient architecture have dominated the mobile sector. When Microsoft adapted Windows to run on ARM, it spoke volumes about the need for power efficiency. Windows is one of the most x86-oriented pieces of software out there.

These shifts in usage profiles and the high demand for compute are creating opportunities for companies like Adapteva, so it’s not too far-fetched to wonder how long until that pain point hits conventional servers.

I often cover companies that are hoping the combination of monolithic applications and a desire to reduce power consumption means webscale and cloud vendors will embrace a new architecture. Companies such as Tilera, SeaMicro, Adapteva, Calxeda and others are all betting the next gear Facebook or Amazon buys will be their hardware or contain their chips.

However, even in its state-of-the-art data center optimized at the server level to be energy-efficient, Facebook challenged the way servers and data centers are built but didn’t touch the silicon itself. So, clearly, the webscale world isn’t champing at the bit to replace the x86-based servers their applications are running on. SeaMicro even has shown charts demonstrating that the CPU is only a third of the power associated with running a server, which means there’s still plenty of fat to trim. Of course, SeaMicro is building a server that trims that non-CPU fat and runs Intel’s Atom chips.

However, the global demand for energy and the supply we currently have are reaching a point where it’s safe to conclude that power consumption will become a greater cost and constraint associated with operating data centers. And at some point, building in cooler climates, hot and cold aisle containment, and even newly designed servers won’t be enough if the silicon itself is too hot.

So the question isn’t if, but when, server companies abandon the PC-style architecture. Perhaps Intel, AMD or Via will continue to tweak x86 silicon until it can perform more calculations using less power, or perhaps it will be time for Amazon or Microsoft Azure to go with ARM, Tilera — or even Adapteva.

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A panel of the future of computing and programming at Structure 2011.

We are moving from the information age to the insight age, where it’s not just data that matters, but finding ways to use it. These are uncharted waters, and the needs of the computing systems that will discover these insights are remarkably different from the computing systems we use today.

It is not a surprise that the computer industry is building chip with more cores to keep up with influx of data and the need to process it faster. Adding cores is a way to boost the number of processors and make a chip perform better without trying to increase the clock speed. And with more cores, we need to think differently about programming. And in this lies a big challenge and big opportunity.

The crux of the issue is how to program massively multicore chips so performance can scale along with the number of cores. I’ve covered MIT’s efforts on this as well as laid out how IBM is taking the programming and putting it on a chip modeled after the human brain. And IBM researcher David Ungar is apparently thinking that making less accurate computers is an answer.

More cores means less accuracy?

Unger, who is a researcher at IBM, is speaking at the SPLASH conference in Portland, Ore. in October. In a tantalizing summary of his talk, he explains his version of the many core problem and hints at a solution that IBM is working on along with Portland State University and Vrije Universiteit Brussel called the Renaissance project. The summary says:

If we cannot skirt Amdahl’s Law, the last 900 cores will do us no good whatsoever. What does this mean? We cannot afford even tiny amounts of serialization. Locks?! Even lock-free algorithms will not be parallel enough. They rely on instructions that require communication and synchronization between cores’ caches. Just as we learned to embrace languages without static type checking, and with the ability to shoot ourselves in the foot, we will need to embrace a style of programming without any synchronization whatsoever.

Ungar’s solution is to accept that a lack of synchronization also means that the computer will then give back less accurate results. “The obstacle we shall have to overcome, if we are to successfully program manycore systems, is our cherished assumption that we write programs that always get the exactly right answers,” it says. This runs counter to the love of accuracy that is the current rage in scientific and parallel computing, but it also seems in line with several other predictions about computing future. For example, Rice University is looking at probabilistic computing which sacrifices accuracy for more energy-efficient computers, and startup Lyric Semiconductor is also weighing such compromises.

Why are today’s chips and programming models hitting a wall?

The computing model is changing thanks to highly distributed nodes and single-focused applications such as Facebook or Google’s search engine, and mirrored in that change is a silicon-level shift to building massively multicore computers. The idea is that adding more cores boosts the performance of the chip with the caveat that the operating system understands how to use the hundreds or even thousands of cores at its disposal. But so far, getting an OS that can direct that many cores is a challenge. There are also physical challenges associated with accessing memory and not clogging the communications between cores on a chip.

Tilera is one such company building massively multicore chips, and Intel, Nvidia and AMD are also making plays in this area. So far, Nvidia and AMD, which are focusing on graphics processors, have built out tools to help program many-cored GPUs. Adapteva is a startup making many-core chips for cell phones and tablets, and I’m sure there are plenty of other efforts out there.

But for every many-core architecture out there, a programming model must be found to optimize it. And finding one that works on multiple chips will better serve the industry given that esoteric OSes won’t get the development love of the masses, and thus are less likely to win over converts. Nvidia is a perfect example of this. Until it created CUDA, a tool that helps scientist write C-level programs for the GPU, using its computers for anything other than games was super niche. But after CUDA more and more scientists picked it up, and now it’s even being deployed in supercomputers and specialty servers.

So the challenge for those, like Ungar, who are rethinking the way computers are programmed, is to find a way to do it without forcing programmers to throw out their old applications and rewrite. As big data applications become more prevalent, the discussion over the best hardware and best software will get louder, and perhaps some winners will emerge.

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The concept of an accelerator is a familiar one in super computing, where the addition of a specialized massively multicore chip, such as a graphics processor or custom chip, is becoming more common. But unlike a GPU, the 64-core Adapteva chip only operates at one watt. To understand how powerful that is from an energy efficiency perspective, a four-to-eight-core server chip could operate at anywhere from 60-120 watts. And the challenge of building the next generation of supercomputers is constrained by the power demands such massive supercomputers would require.

But Andreas Olofsson, the founder and CEO of Adapteva, isn’t focusing on the HPC market at first–despite asserting that his design can scale to a 4,096-core design that would run at 64 watts. He said that while there is plenty of talk about low-power computing, “As long as you can plug something into a wall, the need for low power goes down significantly. It’s only a little bit painful.” However, in the mobile world where devices need to run all day, yet avoid bulky batteries, power consumption is at a premium. So that’s where Adapteva will focus for its big push (the company has some military applications as well).

The company began in 2008 and has managed to raise $2 million in funding from angels and boardmaker BittWare, its first customer. Amazingly, with that small amount of funding it has managed to have three versions of its chip built, making the startup incredibly capital efficient. However, the goal isn’t to build chips for the mobile market, but to license the technology, much like ARM, the firm behind the most common architecture in mobile phones, does. BittWare will manufacture the Adaptevea chip design — called the Epiphany– on its boards.

But in a highly competitive market, and especially on smarthphones, where space on the board is at such a premium, will device makers really embrace an unproven and as-yet-unneeded chip? Olofsson has two more difficult tasks to accomplish (since he’s apparently taken care of the hard task of building and designed a 64-core chip that runs at 1 watt for less than $2 million.) He must explain to board makers, chip firms and device makers why gadgets need this rather foreign accelerator chip, and he has to convince them that it makes sense to process data on the phone, rather than ship it over the cellular network.

The first task is made easier by the low-power envelope and by the fact that the full 64-core system on a system is fairly small — about 8mm square Olofsson said. Check out the model of the A5 system on a chip used inside Apple devices provided below to see how much space the Epiphany chip can take up. It would have to replace existing GPUs in this case.

The second task may be made easier by people’s desire to handle tasks such as speech or facial recognition or intense video games on their mobile devices. Olofsson argues that the latency inherent in sending even voice recognition to a server is problematic and that gameplay is impossible. Plus it costs more in terms of data charges and can drain the battery. “If you can keep the radio quiet and use the processing locally the battery life gets better,” he said.

Like many visionaries pushing a new technology he’s not entirely sure how the Epiphany could change mobile computing, but he’s certain that by boosting performance on smartphones to this degree it will. I’m eager to see if mobile device makers agree.

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