About

Company Overview

Stream Processors Inc. (SPI), is a fabless semiconductor company and a leader in parallel processors for embedded markets.

SPI's stream processing technology delivers an unprecedented combination of C programmability, power-efficiency and performance to empower customers with a shorter time to market and reduced total costs.

Shipping since 2007, Storm-1 Series delivers industry-leading price/performance and power-efficiency, combined with easy-to-use software development tools. It targets demanding multimedia and signal processing and is today used in products ranging from intelligent video surveillance to consumer A/V electronics.

SPI is venture funded by Austin Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, and Woodside Fund. The company is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California.


Parallel Processing. Made Simple.

History

In recognition that single-threaded processor architectures were running out of steam while multi-core approaches were plagued by bandwidth and programming issues, 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.

An advanced compiler was developed to manage a distributed memory hierarchy and schedule execution of data batches in parallel. This resulted in excellent power-efficiency with predictable execution while relieving the programmer from having to manage caches or DMA. This in turn meant that programmers could develop and performance-tune applications in a matter of days or weeks, not months as with traditional multi-core or FPGA-type architectures.

A number applications ranging from wireless baseband processing, 3D graphics, video content analysis, image compression, encryption to IP forwarding were ported to Imagine. As a result of this research, the core stream processing concept became adopted in other designs, such as GPGPUs from companies such as nVidia and ATI.

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