SAN FRANCISCO—Fabless ASIC house eASIC Corp. said Wednesday (May 2) that the Tokyo Institute of Technology, in collaboration with Hitotsubashi University, has successfully demonstrated a 3X increase in energy efficiency for a green supercomputer used for performing astronomical simulations using eASIC's Nextreme-2 NEW ASIC devices.
According to eASIC (Santa Clara, Calif.) the Tokyo Institute of Technology leverage Nextreme-2 NEW ASIC's low power nature to achieve an energy efficiency ratio of 6.5 GFLOPS/Watt for its GRAPE-8 super computer.
EASIC maintains that its Nextreme-2 NEW ASIC devices are commonly used for replacing FPGAs for high volume and power sensitive applications. Manufactured using a low-power 45-nm process and employing single via programming which eliminates the need for power hungry SRAMs that FPGAs require for programming look-up tables and routing, eASIC devices typically enable FPGA users to achieve up to 80 percent lower power consumption, according to eASIC. The firm's GreenPowerVia technology also enables users to completely turn off any logic and memories that are unused in a design, the company said.
Junichiro Makino, Professor at Tokyo Institute of Technology Graduate School of Science and Engineering, said in a statement that eASIC's devices have enabled the university to take a "giant step forward" in resolving power issues with next-generation supercomputers. "Standard cell ASIC was prohibitively expensive and FPGA power consumption simply could not allow us to beat the previous record of 2.1GFLOPS/Watt which was held by IBM’s BG/Q green supercomputer," Makino said.