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It's not clear what the instruction set is. Is there any software that can run on it (and not on ARM A9 like in their demos)? It's also not clear whether it's
by rorrr 14y ago
It's not clear what the instruction set is. Is there any software that can run on it (and not on ARM A9 like in their demos)?
It's also not clear whether it's a SIMD solution. If that's the case, they are basically reinventing GPUs.
- vidarh 14y agoAll the architecture documentation is available. The instruction set is custom. There's a gcc port. The OS is hosted on the ARM, but several of their demos involve calculations offloaded to the Epiphany chip, otherwise there wouldn't be much point. It is not SIMD. Each core is totally independent of the others. Basically the cores are structured in a grid, and all cores have 32KB in-core static RAM, but can also access the memory of all the other cores (at the cost of a few cycles delay), or main memory. You could certainly use them as much like a SIMD if you wanted to, but then you'd likely get better performance out of a GPU. We'll see when they deliver on their kickstarter project what type of performance people get out of it in reality...