Kalray is a fabless semiconductor company specialized in the application of MPPAmanycore technology to high-performance processing. It targets two main markets: networking and storage infrastructure in data centers; and high-performance embedded computing for critical applications. Kalray was created in 2008 as a spin-off from the CEA. It is headquartered in Grenoble, has about 70 employees and has 3 other office locations: Sophia Antipolis, Los Altos, California and Tokyo. Its customers are system integrators and equipment manufacturers for data centers, automotive, defense and aerospace.
MPPA® manycore processors are composed of clusters of 16 VLIW cores each. A high-speed network on chip is used to interconnect clusters. The MPPA core implements a 5-issue VLIW architecture that provides strong timing predictability properties while delivering scalar performances competitive with high-end superscalar application processors. MPPA processors can be programmed using a Software Development Kit that encompasses the GNU toolchain, supporting standard programming environment for C and C++ with OpenMP, OpenCL. Neural network inference applications are supported by a fully automatic code generator called KaNN that takes trained neural networks described in Caffe or TensorFlow and produces optimized C code for low-latency inference.
MPPA-256 Andey
Produced in 2013 in CMOS 28HP technology from TSMC, this processor running at 400 MHz has been designed as a target for a cyclostatic dataflow language called Sigma-C.
MPPA2-256 Bostan
Produced in 2015 with the same CMOS 28HP technology from TSMC, this processor 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. Each VLIW core was extended with a tightly coupled cryptographic coprocessor for security protocol acceleration.
MPPA2.2-256 Bostan2
Produced 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® standard interface, and also the NVMe over Fabrics standard using RDMA.
MPPA3 Coolidge
The 3rd-generation MPPA processor Coolidge has been released. Based on TSMC 16nm FinFET process technology, this processor includes 80 64-bit VLIW processing cores distributed among 5 clusters, 8x 25Gbit/s Ethernet and 16x PCIe Gen4 interfaces. Each VLIW core is extended with a tightly coupled tensor co-processor for deep learning application acceleration.
Product history
The first Kalray patent was filed in 2010. Today the company holds 23 patent families, 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, for networking and storage applications, both of which can be programmed with either standard C or C++. TurboCard and KONIC both utilize the MPPA2-256 Bostan 2nd generation processor. In 2018, the Kalray solutions were certified by the NVM Express organization through the University of New Hampshire InterOperability Laboratory, an independent testing provider of standard conformance solutions and multi-vendor interoperability. This certification was the first of its kind for a fully integrated system.
Listing on Euronext
In 2017, ahead of the launch of Kalray's third-generation microprocessor, Safran and Pengpai joined the company's historical investors. In 2018, Alliance Ventures and Definvest also acquired stakes in Kalray. On June 12, 2018, Kalray launched its IPO on the Euronext ParisStock Market and raised €47.7M, "the most significant IPO since Euronext Growth was created in Paris".
