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Yes, these were carrier boards with numerous (8-16?) sub-boards each of which had an RK3399 CPU, each of which has 6 CPU cores (2xCortex-A72 cores, 4xCortex-A53
by contingencies 8y ago
Yes, these were carrier boards with numerous (8-16?) sub-boards each of which had an RK3399 CPU, each of which has 6 CPU cores (2xCortex-A72 cores, 4xCortex-A53 cores) plus a NEON coprocessor and Mali T860 MP4 GPU. The article discusses 24 cores. The Firefly hardware I saw would therefore have at least 6x8 = 48 CPU cores, or double the ARM64 CPU cores discussed in the article, before even counting the coprocessor or the 8-16 GPUs also included.
- subway 8y agoDepending on workload, pure core count can be irrelevant when your interconnect is trash and you have no shared memory. You might see OK performance if the interconnect somehow supports RDMA, but that seems exceedingly unlikely. Almost all these cluster boards are using gigabit ethernet interconnect. Not to mention you spend a core or more per SoC to handle your os and interconnect/network interrupts. NEON is implemented on a per-core basis, not as a separate coprocessor. Every A53 (and your handful of A72s) supports NEON. I'll give you the GPUs... if you really want to put in all the effort for that sweet sweet OpenCL 1.2 action on an out of date vendor kernel. An RK3399 cluster, and a single many-core system is a nonsensical apples to oranges comparison.