Caption: The Akeana team outside the company's offices in Santa Clara
Few could cast any doubt on the quality of Akeana’s pedigree. This Santa Clara located firm has an executive team made up of former Marvell, Broadcom, Intel, Google and IBM employees. The high regard that the company has succeeded in gaining from the industry is made clear by the fact that it has already raised over $100 million in VC funding (with the Mayfield Fund, Fidelity Ventures and Kleiner Perkins all contributing).It has brought together a team of close to 150 engineering professionals. Having recently come out of stealth mode, Akeana has now announced 3 RISC-V-based processor IP series. These draw on the decades’ worth of know how that each of the founder members has built up from previous high-profile projects - and offer power, performance and area (PPA) characteristics that claim to go beyond what the big established players can attain. They span all the way from compact entry level 32-bit processing cores for use in edge-deployed microcontroller units (MCUs) through to sophisticated 64-bit cores for high performance computing applications (with scope to ramp the core numbers up to several hundred). All of these processor IP options are accompanied by system IP blocks, hardware accelerator IP and interconnect fabric IP, in order to present customers with a comprehensive platform that will facilitate their system-on-chip (SoC) implementations. The company’s early customer engagements have mainly been in the AI and server space. However, it has also seen traction in edge and consumer applications, such as next-generation wearables, etc.
Name: Akeana
Website: www.akeana.com
Founded: 3.5 years ago
Location: Silicon Valley, USA
Industry: AI computation
Technology: Scalable processor IP
While speaking with EPDT, Akeana’s CEO, Rabin Sugumar, said; "Since we can provide customers with all the IP as a full compute subsystem made up of processing, plus interconnect and accelerator elements, we are in a position to truly unlock the full potential of RISC-V. When customers engage with us, they get all the elements they need, rather than having to deal with multiple IP vendors, and then being forced to integrate things themselves. The market has been very clear about that, with customers not wanting to have to put all those items together. They are looking for a simple one-stop-shop approach, so that everything in a compute subsystem is provided and they can make sure that it’s all interoperable. Also, because we've effectively got this continuum, customers might start off with a low or medium level processor implementation, but then want to scale up performance when they do their next iteration. Then there’s the situation that some customers will have multiple product lines and over multiple generations. So, obviously it’s helpful for them if they can use our IP across these different product lines, as the engineering team will be familiar with the IP already.”
“Though there are other companies that talk about transitioning the high-performance server market, the advantage that we have is that we’ve actually done this before. Through our past work on the Cavium/Marvell ThunderX devices, we enabled the data centre sector to move from x86-based processor topologies and to embrace Arm. Now we’re set to help them again, by supporting their transitioning from the Arm ecosystem towards RISC-V. We are able to find gaps in the ecosystem where RISC-V can play and focus on addressing them,” Sugumar went on to explain.
Caption: Akeana's demo for the RISC-V Summit
“The mechanics that were utilised when the enterprise sector moved to Arm are being reused again. Just as before, it’s all about access to very high-performance IP from a superior source, combined with a maturing RISC-V ISA as evidenced in the just released RVA23 profile, and accelerated by an ecosystem software effort such as RISE that we engage in actively. Our track record of delivering the world’s first ARM supercomputer means that customers have confidence in us as high-performance experts, while other vendors will be perceived as being an uncertain gamble,” Amit Nanda, VP Strategy & Partnerships at Akeana, added.Interest in adopting Akeana IP is further backed up by the fact that Ashling and Embecosm have worked with the company on producing a complete toolchain to support its usage - consisting of optimising compilers, plus debugging and trace analysis elements. Likewise, the fact that Akeana already has hardware that implements the newly announced RVA 23 profile shows that it is ahead of the game. It also underlines the influence the company has within the RISC-V International consortium (with Sugumar sitting on its board).
“There’s a lot of new formats coming and extra instructions that are being added. The fact that we have toolchain support is a huge strength, because it allows new items to be incorporated,” Nanda points out. “For example, compliant vector and vector crypto extensions are something that most competitors have not really implemented yet, whereas we’re already running it on FPGA hardware, and we showed demos at the RISC-V Summit a few weeks ago.”
Though start-ups often burn through a lot of money while in their early stages of commercial development, Akeana appears much better prepared than other entrants in the RISC-V market segment. As Nanda noted; “The maturity of our operation and the server legacy it draws upon means that we’re very measured in our spending. This discipline comes with experience and is infused into our culture and processes. To succeed in RISC-V, you need to be in it for the long haul. You can’t just arrive and then quickly flame out. You must have a lasting strategy. Therefore, it’s imperative we ensure that our funds are able to keep on supporting us along that journey. The investment we have and the prudence we are using in terms of operational expenditure give us a very lengthy runway.”
Link to Press Release