About

Company Overview

Stream Processors Inc. (SPI), is a fabless semiconductor company and the leader in easy-to-use high-performance embedded processors. SPI's Stream Processor™ Architecture harnesses massive parallelism with tools-managed data scheduling in a predictable, single-core C programming model, delivering an unprecedented combination of performance and software development simplicity.

Shipping in volume since 2007, SPI's award-winning Storm-1 stream processor platform has broad applicability for video, imaging and signal processing and is today in use in products ranging from video surveillance equipment to cost-sensitive consumer media products.

SPI is venture funded by Austin Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, and Woodside Fund. The company is headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif. with a Solutions Group in Bangalore, India.


Parallel Processing. Made Simple.

History

In recognition that single-threaded processor architectures were running out of steam while traditional multi-core approaches are plagued by bandwidth and programming complexity issues, SPI co-founder Bill Dally conceived the idea of stream processing in 1996 while professor at MIT. Moving to Stanford, a multi-million dollar DARPA grant helped fund the development of the "Imagine" stream processor and compiler tools.

The key idea was based on using the C compiler to manage a distributed memory hierarchy and schedule de-coupled, batch-wise data movement and execution. This resulted in a linear scalability with predictable, 'cache-less', execution while relieving the programmer from having to deal with caches and DMA. A data-parallel approach with implicit load-balancing further provided high utilization, and a low-cost footprint for DSP applications.

A number of applications ranging from wireless baseband processing, 3D graphics, video content analysis, video compression, encryption to IP forwarding were ported to Imagine. The Imagine research also inspired other designs, such as GPUs from AMD/ATI/nVidia, the IBM Cell, and Toshiba SpursEngine.

SPI was spun off from Stanford in 2004, founded by prof. Dally and his team, and joined by a team of seasoned Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. From the unusual starting point of having proven silicon and tools, the company was able to start shipping its first commercial products to customers in 2006.