Adapteva Parallella Supercomputing Boards Start Shipping

hypnosec writes "Adapteva has started shipping its $99 Parallella parallel processing single-board supercomputer to initial Kickstarter backers. Parallella is powered by Adapteva's 16-core and 64-core Epiphany multicore processors that are meant for parallel computing unlike other commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) devices like Raspberry Pi that don't support parallel computing natively. The first model to be shipped has the following specifications: a Zynq-7020 dual-core ARM A9 CPU complemented with Epiphany Multicore Accelerator (16 or 64 cores), 1GB RAM, MicroSD Card, two USB 2.0 ports, optional four expansion connectors, Ethernet, and an HDMI port." They are also releasing documentation, examples, and an SDK (brief overview, it's Free Software too). And the device runs GNU/Linux for the non-parallel parts (Ubuntu is the suggested distribution).

Comments

Re:Tiny but useful?

[jvangeld]

The ARM cores serve as a host for the Epiphany cores, roughly similar to the way an X86 CPU serves as a host to your video card. Epiphany is not ARM, it is a chip with a number of 1 GHz RISC cores that all communicate via a network-on-chip. So, it is optimized for doing a lot of floating-point arithmetic at very low power consumption.

Re:half the Gflops, 64 cores, 80% lower cost, 5 wa

[afidel]

Yeah but compare it to a GPGPU and you start to realize how slow it is, a $200 660 GTX does 1880 GFLOPS in 140W.

1 GFLOPS/$ versus 9.4 GFLOPS/$
10 GFLOPS/Watt versus 13.4 GFLOPS/Watt