China startup crafts 'unified' multicore processor

ICube believes that its Harmony Unified Processor is the first ever architecture developed to handle both logic and graphics processing in a single core and in each of multiple processing pipelines. It has already received 65nm silicon of the first instantiation of Harmony, the dual-core IC1, back from its foundry supplier. The company is aiming at a 2012 roll out of samples and volume production.

Any attempt to introduce a novel instruction set architecture to compete against the broadly-supported ARM, x86 from Intel and others, is likely to be treated with skepticism by many. Objections are likely to be on commercial as much as on technical grounds. However, ICube claims that starting with a blank sheet of paper and specifically targeting the needs of mobile devices, has given it power-efficiency and cost-efficiency advantages over the established architectures. It also claims that with the advent of Android the barriers to entry for a new architecture are much lower than they once were.

The executive credentials of ICube suggest that it could at least have a chance of success. Chief technology officer Simon Moy has 20 years' experience having spent several years as a principal engineer with Nvidia Corp. where he worked on the hardware design of the vertex shaders and stream processors in several generations of GPUs. Prior to that, Moy worked at Silicon Graphics, IBM and LSI Logic.

Chief scientist Fred Chow's expertise is on the compiler side, where he has 30 years experience, having worked as principal engineer at MIPS, chief scientist at Silicon Graphics and director of compiler engineering at PathScale Inc.

"Developing our own intellectual property from the ground up has been a key differentiation of ICube from other technology companies in China," said Moy, in a statement. "This provides us with much greater areas for innovation, enables us to leverage the latest semiconductor trends and lowers the cost of our system-on-a-chip products relative to other chipmakers. We are also proud to have attracted and built a world-class development team composed of by Silicon Valley veterans and top engineering talents in China. We are confident that our revolutionary high technology product will be well received by the market and create value to our shareholders."

- Peter Clarke
??EE Times