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Kalray

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Kalray
Company typeSociété Anonyme
IndustrySemiconductors
Founded27 August 2008; 16 years ago (2008-08-27)[1]
Headquarters
Montbonnot
,
Rhône-Alpes, France
Key people
Eric Baissus (CEO)
ProductsMany-core processor
Websitewww.kalrayinc.com

Kalray is a French fabless semiconductor company headquartered in Montbonnot, France.

Corporate history

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Kalray was founded in 2008 as a spin-off of CEA French lab, with investors such as Renault–Nissan–Mitsubishi Alliance, Safran, NXP Semiconductors, CEA and Bpifrance.[2][3]

In April 2020, Kalray announced an $8 million investment from NXP which allows them to be able to develop various solutions for autonomous driving together.[4][5]

In January 2022, Kalray negotiated with arcapix Holdings Ltd. for their acquisition. Arcapix is the parent company of pixitmedia and arcastream.[6][7] At the Flash Memory Summit Awards (FMS) in August 2022, Kalray was awarded the Most Innovative Technology award for their Flashbox.[8][9] In May 2023, the IP-CUBE project that is led by Kalray won the "Technological Maturation and Demonstration of Embedded Artificial Intelligence Solutions" label under the "France Relance 2030 – Future Investments" plan.[10][11]

Product history

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The first Kalray patent was filed in 2010. Today the company holds more than 30 patent families,[12] 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,[13] for networking and storage applications, both of which can be programmed with either standard C or C++.[14] TurboCard and KONIC both utilize the MPPA2-256 Bostan second generation processor.

In January 2019, Kalray and NXP began a partnership for new platforms for automated driving. The Massively Parallel Processor Array (MPPA) chips from Kalrey together with the two NXP chips will be used in the new BlueBox 2.0.[15] Together with Wistron, Kalray launched the FURIO1200 storage system in January 2021.[16][17] The K200-LP accelerator card was launched in June 2021.[18]

Kalray was granted a fund from the French government in May 2023 to develop the Dolomites manycore processor.[19][20]

Kalray chips

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Kalray chips are code-named after Mountains. However each chip is called a "MPPA" for "massively parallel processor array":

MPPA-256 Andey

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Produced in 2013 in CMOS 28HP technology from TSMC, this SoC (or System-on-Chip) runs at 400 MHz and contains 256 VLIW processing cores.

MPPA2-256 Bostan

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Produced in 2015 with the same CMOS 28HP technology from TSMC, this SoC 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 (up to 80 Gbit/s). Each VLIW core was extended with a tightly coupled cryptographic coprocessor for security protocol acceleration.

MPPA2.2-256 Bostan2

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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 (NVMe) standard interface (for connecting hosts to PCIe bus-attached SSDs), and also the NVMe over Fabrics standard using RDMA (for connections between servers, storage controllers, and NVMe enclosures).

MPPA3-80 Coolidge

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The third-generation MPPA processor Coolidge has been released.[21] Based on TSMC 16 nm FinFET process technology, this processor includes 80 64-bit VLIW processing cores distributed among 5 clusters, 8x 25 Gbit/s Ethernet and 16x PCIe Gen4 interfaces. Each VLIW core is extended with a tightly coupled tensor co-processor for deep learning application acceleration.[22]

MPPA3-80 Coolidge2

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The Coolidge2 DPU Processor was released in 2023 and is aimed at LLMs, with an additional focus on efficient usage of NVME storage.[23]

Listing on Euronext

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In 2017, ahead of the launch of Kalray's third-generation microprocessor, Safran[24] and Pengpai joined the company's historical investors (mainly CEA Investissement, ACE, INOCAP).[25] In 2018, Alliance Ventures (strategic venture capital fund operated by Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi) and Definvest (an investment fund managed by Bpifrance on behalf of the French Ministry of Armed Forces) also acquired stakes in Kalray.[26]

On June 12, 2018, Kalray launched its IPO on the Euronext Paris Stock Market[27] and raised €47.7M (after exercise of the over-allocation option), "the most significant IPO since Euronext Growth was created in Paris."[28]

References

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  1. ^ "Kalray entering the register of commerce". Retrieved 2018-05-26.
  2. ^ Pelé, Anne-Françoise (2020-12-11). "Kalray Completes Capital Increase to Fund Next Processor". EE Times Europe. Retrieved 2023-10-04.
  3. ^ "Kalray Announces Availability of Its New DPU Processor: 'Coolidge2'". HPCwire. Retrieved 2023-10-04.
  4. ^ "Strategic Investment of NXP in Kalray". www.businesswire.com. 2020-04-02. Retrieved 2023-10-04.
  5. ^ "NXP makes strategic investment in Kalray". New Electronics. 2020-07-04. Retrieved 2023-10-04.
  6. ^ Creamer, Jon (2022-01-24). "pixitmedia in talks to be bought by Kalray". Televisual. Retrieved 2023-10-05.
  7. ^ Kalray. "KALRAY ENTERS INTO EXCLUSIVE NEGOTIATIONS FOR THE ACQUISITION OF ARCAPIX HOLDINGS LTD, A LEADING PROVIDER OF SOFTWARE-DEFINED STORAGE SOLUTIONS FOR DATA-INTENSIVE APPLICATIONS". www.prnewswire.com. Retrieved 2023-10-05.
  8. ^ "Kalray's Flashbox™ Wins Coveted Flash Memory Summit Award for Most Innovative Technology". www.businesswire.com. 2022-08-04. Retrieved 2023-10-05.
  9. ^ "Kalray's Flashbox™ Wins Coveted Flash Memory Summit Award for Most Innovative Technology". Bloomberg.com. 2022-08-04. Retrieved 2023-10-05.
  10. ^ "Kalray, Arteris, Secure-IC, and Thales, Win the Call for Projects Related to the AI Acceleration Strategy of the "France Relance 2030 - Future Investments" Plan". Design And Reuse. 2023-05-11. Retrieved 2024-01-18.
  11. ^ Ahmad, Majeed (2023-05-15). "Aspired European Nvidia aims DPUs at embedded AI". EDN. Retrieved 2024-01-18.
  12. ^ "Kalray: Hardware and software solutions for high-performance data-centric computing, from Cloud to Edge". cea.fr. 2022-12-15. Retrieved 2024-01-05.
  13. ^ "Boards - Kalray". Kalray. Retrieved 2018-06-28.
  14. ^ Kalray. "Kalray to Demonstrate 3+ Million IOPS with an NVMe-oF JBOF System". www.prnewswire.com. Retrieved 2017-05-04.
  15. ^ Abuelsamid, Sam. "NXP And Kalray Team Up On High-Performance Automated Driving Compute Platform". Forbes. Retrieved 2023-10-04.
  16. ^ "Wistron & Kalray unveil data centre storage appliance". DataCenterNews Asia Pacific. Retrieved 2023-10-04.
  17. ^ "Wistron and Kalray Announce FURIO1200™ Storage Appliance". Bloomberg.com. 2021-01-21. Retrieved 2023-10-04.
  18. ^ Flaherty, Nick (2021-06-16). "Kalray teams for multicore storage card in cloud and edge". eeNews Europe. Retrieved 2023-10-08.
  19. ^ "France funds sovereign AI with Kalray, Arteris, Secure-IC, Thales". eenewseurope.com. 2023-05-11. Retrieved 2024-04-22.
  20. ^ "Kalray, Arteris, Secure-IC, and Thales, Win the Call for Projects Related to the AI Acceleration Strategy of the "France Relance 2030 - Future Investments" Plan". design-reuse.com. 2023-05-11. Retrieved 2024-04-22.
  21. ^ "Kalray unveils Coolidge at CES 2020". Kalray. 2020-01-06. Retrieved 2020-01-06.
  22. ^ "Kalray's Coolidge processor adds deep learning acceleration". eenewseurope.com. 2017-05-24. Retrieved 2024-01-05.
  23. ^ "Kalray Announces Production Launch of 'Coolidge2' DPU Processor Optimized for AI and Intensive Data Processing". hpcwire.com. 2023-06-06. Retrieved 2024-04-22.
  24. ^ "Safran acquires stake in Kalray, European leader in new-generation processors for critical onboard systems". Safran. 2017-06-21. Retrieved 2018-06-28.
  25. ^ "Kalray raises $26 million, anticipating the launch of its third generation of microprocessor - Kalray". Kalray. 2018-06-18. Retrieved 2018-06-28.
  26. ^ "Alliance Ventures and Definvest acquire stakes in Kalray - Kalray". Kalray. 2018-05-02. Retrieved 2018-06-28.
  27. ^ "Euronext Growth market announces listing of Kalray". LeapRate. 2018-06-13. Retrieved 2018-06-28.
  28. ^ "Kalray has raised €43.5M: the most significant IPO since Euronext Growth was created in Paris - Kalray". Kalray. 2018-06-07. Retrieved 2018-06-28.
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