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Le sigh.... dude mounted a bunch of underpowered CH32V203 microcontrollers on a bunch of simple boards and connected them by GPIOs. It is not a cluster in any t
by dmitrygr 2y ago
Le sigh.... dude mounted a bunch of underpowered CH32V203 microcontrollers on a bunch of simple boards and connected them by GPIOs. It is not a cluster in any traditional sense, and it is not 14.7 GHz.
Whoever wrote the wccftech article has both never heard of Amdahl's law AND was too busy making clickbait titles to view the original video...
- brucehoult 2y agoWhat's "underpowered" about it? 32 bit processor running at 144 MHz (so 144 MIPS, less branch or memory stalls). That's similar to a Pentium 100 or PPC 601/100. And it's using 20 mW, vs about 10 W for those, so a factor of 500 better in energy use. Certainly faster CPUs exist, but you don't always need faster, and for what it does it is pretty efficient -- and for a suitably embarrassingly parallel task 256 of them are still low power (about 5W).
- dmitrygr 2y agounderpowered compared to what is meant by "cluster" or "GHz"
- numpad0 2y agoSaving web searches: 144 MIPS x 256 processors = 36864 raw MIPS, or about twice as fast as an Xbox 360, or fast as up to mid-90s supercomputer, if we utterly completely ignore obvious node interconnect problem.
- brucehoult 2y agoThere are useful things that don't need a lot of interconnect speed. For example all of those XYZ@home projects (SETI, primes ...), or finding the hash for bitcoin blocks. Those just need aggregate speed and low energy use per computation. This particular CPU might or might not have instructions needed to make those particular computations efficient, of course.
- jononor 2y agoHow many of them can be done with 2 kB RAM per node? ;) I like this project. It is not very useful - but it does not need to be, nor does it try :D
- dathinab 2y agothis things still need "enough" per-node performance, which potentially involve multiple cores with fast interconnects and definitely involves having enough RAM and cache etc. also while the latency for @home projects are higher the bandwidth of your internet upload/download might be faster then what that cluster has effectively (due to the shared bus) through this doesn't mean anything in the end the project wasn't about creating a faster DIY special purpose compute system at home or anything like that it's about a cool challenging and inspiring tech hobby project
- theamk 2y agoit's 20KB (0.02MB, 0.00002GB) data RAM per CPU You are not going to get anything useful supercomputer-wise with that much RAM.
- yarg 2y agoLe sigh? Is it me, or is the redditisation of this site no longer a semi-noob illusion?
- rowanG077 2y agoWhy isn't it a cluster?
- dathinab 2y agoit is a cluster without question compared to a super computer cluster a small highly simplified cluster with a fraction of total practical compute power then even a single node of many other cluster system but still a cluster and the way it has blades and a bunch with each having multiple cards on them and a single shared buss connecting all of them and then a higher level bus which interconnects the blades is (from a generic far away POV) quite similar to how super computer cluster might be build, just much much simpler
- amelius 2y agoThis other DIY youtube dude is making a camera sensor from scratch. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40324370 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40324370 Perhaps watch that video instead if you're disappointed about tfa.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- yunohn 2y ago> Whoever wrote the wccftech article TBH this article sounds like it was written by an LLM using a transcript of the video or something. It has that LLM smell for me.