An Interview with Andreas Olofsson - Adapteva's Ampliative Abacus

The Amp Hour · 18 Jun 2015 · 1h 06m · Episode 254

What this episode covers

Andreas Olofsson, founder of Adapteva, discusses the design of the Epiphany parallel processor and the company's journey with the Parallelo development board. He explains the technical rationale for a specialized, energy-efficient architecture optimized for compute-intensive tasks like matrix math and imaging, contrasting it with general-purpose CPUs and ASICs. Olofsson details the challenges of semiconductor economics, including the high cost of tape-outs and the difficulty of securing venture capital for chip startups. He also reflects on the lessons learned from their 2012 Kickstarter campaign, particularly regarding pricing strategies and the gap between developer platforms and consumer markets.

Mentioned

Companies
Adapteva, Analog Devices, Xilinx, NVIDIA, ARM, Ericsson, DigiKey, RS Components, Amazon, TSMC, GlobalFoundries
Products
Parallelo, Raspberry Pi
Chips
Epiphany, Tiger Shark DSP

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