Stream Processors, Inc. Announces Storm-1 Family of Data-Parallel Digital Signal Processors

New Class of DSPs Removes Programming Barriers for Parallel Processors and Unleashes Industry-Leading Performance

ISSCC 2007, SAN FRANCISCO – Feb. 12, 2007 – Stream Processors, Inc. (SPI), a fabless semiconductor company that is making parallel processing simple, today announced the first members of its Storm-1™ family of data-parallel digital signal processors (DSPs) – the SP16-G160 and the SP8-G80.

Based on the company’s breakthrough SPI Stream Processor™ Architecture (detailed in a separate announcement issued today and titled “Stream Processors, Inc. Announces Breakthrough Digital Signal Processor Architecture at ISSCC 2007”), the Storm-1 family combines the ability to scale to 80 giga multiplications and accumulations per second (GMACs/s) performance with a simple, predictive and efficient C programming model. The Storm-1 family is suitable for a wide range of demanding signal processing applications, such as high-definition video H.264 HD encoding, transcoding, analytics, image processing and video surveillance with processing headroom for customer-specific enhancements.

“Data bandwidth and ease of programming are what matter most in modern computer systems,” said Chip Stearns, president and CEO of SPI. “The level of performance offered by the Storm-1 family will enable a new wave of innovation in markets that have been begging for an easy-to-use path to higher performance without sacrificing software programmability.”

The SP16-G160 and SP8-G80: A New Class of DSPs
The Storm-1 SP16-G160 device is a DSP that offers 160 giga operations per second (GOPS) and 80 GMACs/s of performance by featuring a high-performance data-parallel unit (DPU) with 16 parallel lanes with five ALUs each. Each ALU contains a MAC unit and is capable of four 8-, two 16- or one 32-bit operation per cycle. Input and output data for each lane is stored in on-chip lane register files that are allocated by the compiler to maximize data bandwidth.

Each device includes a MIPS32® 4KEc® CPU core for system tasks, and a second MIPS32® 4KEc® that is dedicated to handling main DSP threads and making kernel function calls to the DPU for acceleration. A rich set of I/O includes Gigabit Ethernet, PCI, and high-speed data ports for video and communications.

Designed to make parallel performance easily accessible to programmers, a key feature of the architecture is its compiler-managed memory hierarchy and single-threaded approach. A simple C programming model allows specification of compute-intensive kernel functions that process data records, enabling the compiler and hardware to efficiently manage on-chip memory and synchronize runtime direct-memory access (DMA). Kernel functions process stream data in a data-parallel fashion across all of the lanes. Unlike traditional DSPs, there is no need to spend time manually choreographing caches or dealing with synchronization of DMA, or load-balance cores, greatly increasing predictability and simplifying the overall programming task.

The Storm-1 SP8-G80 device leverages the SPI Stream Processor Architecture in an eight lane flavor offering 80 GOPS of performance. Additional information about the Storm-1 family can be found at http://www.streamprocessors.com/

Development Tools
SPI’s RapiDev™ tool suite supports an industry standard development and debug flow using C language tools running on a Windows/Cygwin or Linux platform. The RapiDev tool suite includes easy-to-use functional and cycle-accurate simulators and leverages the predictability of SPI’s Stream Processor Architecture to provide a fast, linear path to production code. Source code compatibility is maintained across devices with different numbers of lanes and ALUs, providing greater scalability and portability.

The Storm-1 Development Kit supports evaluation and software development on SPI hardware, and has I/O options to support multiple video sources and formats, including HD and D1.

Price and Availability
Priced at $99 for the SP16-G160 and $59 for the SP8-G80 in production quantities of 10,000 units, the Storm-1 family is currently sampling with full production expected in the second quarter of 2007. The chip is housed in a 31x31mm plastic ball grid array (PBGA) and is implemented in 130 nm 1.0 volt standard CMOS process.

About Stream Processors, Inc.
Stream Processors, Inc. (SPI) is a privately held fabless semiconductor company delivering an innovative stream processing architecture that helps consumer and industrial companies accelerate product development cycles and dramatically reduce system development costs. SPI was founded in 2004 to address the new era of compute-intensive applications requiring radically increased levels of processor performance and power efficiency. The company's technology and products improve application productivity by making parallel processing easier to program and use. Additional information can be found at http://www.streamprocessors.com/.