About

Company Overview

Stream Processors Inc. (SPI), is a fabless semiconductor company and the leader in embedded high-performance media and signal processors.

SPI's patented Stream Processor™ Architecture harnesses massive parallelism in a familiar single-core C programming model to deliver an unprecedented combination of performance and simplicity, enabling companies to get faster to market and slash costs.

Shipping in volume since 2007 with more than twenty design-wins, SPI's Storm-1 family of DSPs has broad applicability for media and signal processing and is today used in products ranging from intelligent video surveillance equipment to high-definition consumer 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 are running out of steam while traditional multi-core approaches are plagued by bandwidth and programming complexity 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 highly efficient "Imagine" stream processor and compiler tools.

The key idea was based on using a regular C programming to hide the complexity from the programmer by allowing the compiler to manage a distributed memory hierarchy and schedule parallel execution of batches of data records. This resulted in a linear scalability with predictable, 'cache-less', execution while relieving the programmer from having to think about caches or DMA. A data-parallel approach with implicit load-balancing further provided high utilization, a  single-thread programming approach, and a low-cost footprint.

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 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 sample products to customers in 2006.