|
Kalray
Kalray is a French fabless semiconductor company headquartered in Montbonnot, France. Corporate historyKalray was founded in 2008 as a spin-off of CEA French lab, with investors such as Renault–Nissan–Mitsubishi Alliance, Safran, NXP Semiconductors, CEA and Bpifrance.[2][3] In April 2020, Kalray announced an $8 million investment from NXP which allows them to be able to develop various solutions for autonomous driving together.[4][5] In January 2022, Kalray negotiated with arcapix Holdings Ltd. for their acquisition. Arcapix is the parent company of pixitmedia and arcastream.[6][7] At the Flash Memory Summit Awards (FMS) in August 2022, Kalray was awarded the Most Innovative Technology award for their Flashbox.[8][9] In May 2023, the IP-CUBE project that is led by Kalray won the "Technological Maturation and Demonstration of Embedded Artificial Intelligence Solutions" label under the "France Relance 2030 – Future Investments" plan.[10][11] Product historyThe first Kalray patent was filed in 2010. Today the company holds more than 30 patent families,[12] including 2 families with an exclusive CEA license. On 22 June 2015, Kalray began the distribution of data center acceleration board families: TurboCard and KONIC,[13] for networking and storage applications, both of which can be programmed with either standard C or C++.[14] TurboCard and KONIC both utilize the MPPA2-256 Bostan second generation processor. In January 2019, Kalray and NXP began a partnership for new platforms for automated driving. The Massively Parallel Processor Array (MPPA) chips from Kalrey together with the two NXP chips will be used in the new BlueBox 2.0.[15] Together with Wistron, Kalray launched the FURIO1200 storage system in January 2021.[16][17] The K200-LP accelerator card was launched in June 2021.[18] Kalray was granted a fund from the French government in May 2023 to develop the Dolomites manycore processor.[19][20] Kalray chipsKalray chips are code-named after Mountains. However each chip is called a "MPPA" for "massively parallel processor array": MPPA-256 AndeyProduced in 2013 in CMOS 28HP technology from TSMC, this SoC (or System-on-Chip) runs at 400 MHz and contains 256 VLIW processing cores. MPPA2-256 BostanProduced in 2015 with the same CMOS 28HP technology from TSMC, this SoC running at 550 MHz was enhanced to increase the floating-point performance of the VLIW cores, to natively support the Linux operating system, and to process high-speed Ethernet (up to 80 Gbit/s). Each VLIW core was extended with a tightly coupled cryptographic coprocessor for security protocol acceleration. MPPA2.2-256 Bostan2Produced in 2017, this processor is based on the previous generation, Bostan, with an improved DDR controller, Ethernet controller and PCIe controller. As a result, this processor fully supports the NVM Express (NVMe) standard interface (for connecting hosts to PCIe bus-attached SSDs), and also the NVMe over Fabrics standard using RDMA (for connections between servers, storage controllers, and NVMe enclosures). MPPA3-80 CoolidgeThe third-generation MPPA processor Coolidge has been released.[21] Based on TSMC 16 nm FinFET process technology, this processor includes 80 64-bit VLIW processing cores distributed among 5 clusters, 8x 25 Gbit/s Ethernet and 16x PCIe Gen4 interfaces. Each VLIW core is extended with a tightly coupled tensor co-processor for deep learning application acceleration.[22] MPPA3-80 Coolidge2The Coolidge2 DPU Processor was released in 2023 and is aimed at LLMs, with an additional focus on efficient usage of NVME storage.[23] Listing on EuronextIn 2017, ahead of the launch of Kalray's third-generation microprocessor, Safran[24] and Pengpai joined the company's historical investors (mainly CEA Investissement, ACE, INOCAP).[25] In 2018, Alliance Ventures (strategic venture capital fund operated by Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi) and Definvest (an investment fund managed by Bpifrance on behalf of the French Ministry of Armed Forces) also acquired stakes in Kalray.[26] On June 12, 2018, Kalray launched its IPO on the Euronext Paris Stock Market[27] and raised €47.7M (after exercise of the over-allocation option), "the most significant IPO since Euronext Growth was created in Paris."[28] References
|
||||||||||||||||
