
Ask HN: What are some legitimate startups working on frontier technologies? - whoisninja
I&#x27;m trying to keep an eye on startups that are coming up with some really legitimate advanced tech that solve real problems... I will be maintaining a list here:<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;nsingla&#x2F;bookmarks&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;frontier_tech.md
======
frompdx
Not sure if you can call it a startup, but I think the work that GreenArrays
ga144 multi-computer chips for embedded applications is very interesting. One
of these days I'd like to get my hands on an evaluation board, but the price
is a little steep.

[http://www.greenarraychips.com/index.html](http://www.greenarraychips.com/index.html)

~~~
whoisninja
looks very interesting, could you help me understand it a bit more - i'm less
aware about hardware side of tech.

seems like it will allow very cheap multiprocessing? so applications could be
gaming, scientific computing, ML? how does it compare to new AMD chips that
have 32 or 64 cores or let's say GPUs? in terms of cost and speed?

found this to be interesting as well:
[https://www.parallella.org/board/](https://www.parallella.org/board/)

helpful:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massively_parallel_processor_a...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massively_parallel_processor_array)

~~~
frompdx
The things that are of greatest interest to me:

\- No clock. Everything is asynchronous instead. This reduces power
consumption.

\- Forth based processors. arrayForth is intended to be the first class
development tool for the chip (according to this site
[http://www.ultratechnology.com/chips.htm](http://www.ultratechnology.com/chips.htm)).

Some of the applications are covered in this pdf:
[http://www.greenarraychips.com/home/documents/greg/PB002-100...](http://www.greenarraychips.com/home/documents/greg/PB002-100822-GA-
Arch.pdf)

> so applications could be gaming, scientific computing, ML?

I think this chip is most useful for embedded applications that demand low
power consumption and parallel or distributed processing. The brochure
indicates that AI/neural nets are a possible application.

> how does it compare to new AMD chips that have 32 or 64 cores or let's say
> GPUs?

Much slower but also much less expensive in terms of cost and energy
consumption. The AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X can do 2,356,230 MIPS at 4.35
GHz while the ga144 can do around 700 (see
[http://www.greenarraychips.com/home/documents/greg/WP002-100...](http://www.greenarraychips.com/home/documents/greg/WP002-100405-energycons.pdf)).
The threadripper is $3500 while the ga144 is only $10 (with a minimum order of
20 chips).

Some casual google suggests the threadripper will use 400 or so watts under
heavy load. This article about the ga144 says:

> and even with all 144 cores running and a peak aggregate performance of 96
> billion operations/second, power consumption is only 650 milliwatts.

[https://www.rs-online.com/designspark/hands-on-
with-a-144-co...](https://www.rs-online.com/designspark/hands-on-
with-a-144-core-processor)

Here is a white paper from GA that discusses power consumption:
[http://www.greenarraychips.com/home/documents/greg/WP002-100...](http://www.greenarraychips.com/home/documents/greg/WP002-100405-energycons.pdf)

The threadripper can do more MIPS per watt, but it comes at the cost of
needing around 120 watts when idle while the ga144 hardly uses any. The white
paper says each processor uses 100 nanowatts while idle. So I suppose that
adds up to 0.0144 milliwatts while idle if every node is activated.

For me, I think the ga144 presents an opportunity to create very low power
event driven portable devices. I think that is an interesting territory to
explore, but I don't have any immediate uses in mind.

~~~
whoisninja
very insightful, thanks for answering all my questions..... seems like you
know your stuff well

