Ambric Am2000
Am2045
Developer	Ambric
Manufacturer	TSMC
Type	Microprocessors
Introduction	October 10, 2006 (announced) December, 2006 (launch)
Architecture	Many-core 32-bit microprocessor
Word size	32 bit 4 octets 8 nibbles
Process	130 nm 0.13 μm 1.3e-4 mm
Technology	CMOS
Clock	1 MHz-333 Mhz
Package	BGA-868

Am2000 was a family of 32-bit MPPAs. The series was introduced at the 2006 Fall Microprocessor Forum. The two flagship models the Am2045 (A) and later Am2045B had over 300 cores with maximum theoretical performance of over one trillion operations per second. Due to the economic downturn of 2008 Ambric assets were sold off to Nethra Imaging which continued to manufacture the chips until 2013. Prior to the acquisition Ambric also announced a 600 cores, 600 MHz model. It's unknown if the model ever made it to market. Designs, software, and related patents are now held by Imagination Technologies.

Ambric, unlike many of its competitors, managed to develop a sound programming model that proved itself to be simple enough and intuitive enough to allow easy programming.

Overview

Introduced in the fall of 2006, the Am2000 is a series of many-core processors implemented as a massively parallel processor array designed to replace high-end embedded processors, DSPs, and FPGAs in applications where fast general-purpose integer arithmetic and digital-signal processing is required. Such tasks usually land themselves fairly well in highly parallel environments.

Ambric's AM2000 series is an example of one of the few massively parallel processors that succeeded in independently developing a solid programming model and tools that worked extremely well with the underlying processor that relatively easy to code. A complete set of development tools were also offered with the product including extensions to Eclipse IDE. Code for the AM2000 used a language called aJava which was a strict subset of Java that compiled directly into machine code.

Architecture

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Programming

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See also

• massively parallel processor array
• Kilocore