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There's so much negativity in this thread, wasn't the whole idea that these guys had plans and an architecture to scale up to the order of a terra-flop by 2014,

by swalsh 14y ago

There's so much negativity in this thread, wasn't the whole idea that these guys had plans and an architecture to scale up to the order of a terra-flop by 2014, and 20 by 2022? And look! they're shipping. This first chip may not be impressive, but I'll welcome a new player to the market who has big plans to innovate.

DanBC 14y ago
Small cheap cards for learning are a great idea. But then they've included some really weird wording. They know that people are hostile to that wording, yet they chose to continue to use it. When you're educating people it's important to be clear about terminology. Having said that, I think it's neat, and I wish them luck. I think they're missing one of the main points of the RPi's success - it is dirt cheap. At $35 people will take a risk. At $90 people need to think about it. That might sound odd on HN where people tend to have a lot more disposable income.
rayiner 14y ago
I don't get the negativity either. If you look at the architecture manual, this is like a cheap Tilera. It's an interesting programming model (lots of cores in a shared memory SMP with weak memory ordering), and the CPU's are pretty vanilla RISC architectures. For $99, it's a great way to play with something that has the properties of the kinds of CPU's you might see in a future supercomputer.
- new299 14y ago
  I wrote my notes up here last time this was doing the rounds: http://41j.com/blog/2012/10/my-take-on-the-adapteva-parallella/ http://41j.com/blog/2012/10/my-take-on-the-adapteva-parallel... I'm pretty skeptical, having played with the Tilera I'm not sure it gives you enough of a benefit to warrant the extra effort. The Parallella also looks a lot like a Tilera, I do wonder if there might be IP issues there down the line. I also still think our best bet for this kind of thing is multicore ARM systems.
- m_mueller 14y ago
  Not to take away anything from Parallela, but you can also get to play around with something that's used in today's supercomputers by buying any Geforce 5xx and start programming in CUDA. A fully documented ARM architecture as an accelerator chip is certainly interesting though. It will take time until the software tooling catches up, but the initial buzz in the HPC community about those ARM newcomers is certainly there. I'd give them a good chance in the long run to outrun Intel MICs and catch up to NVIDIA Tesla. What I'd like to see next is a PCI express expansion card using this technology. See, one of the great benefits about Tesla cards is that you can swap them out in your supercomputers just like you do it with RAM - and you get the newest chip architecture, as long as your PCI bus can handle the load. For multi purpose systems you often still like to have a good number of x86 cores in there however.
fmstephe 14y ago
I am very happy to see this coming out. The negativity found here is really disappointing. I will be very happy to get hold of a good number of cores running with a hardware memory model that is more out-of-order than x86. Sounds like a glorious playground :)

by swalsh 14y ago

DanBC 14y ago

Small cheap cards for learning are a great idea. But then they've included some really weird wording. They know that people are hostile to that wording, yet they chose to continue to use it. When you're educating people it's important to be clear about terminology. Having said that, I think it's neat, and I wish them luck. I think they're missing one of the main points of the RPi's success - it is dirt cheap. At $35 people will take a risk. At $90 people need to think about it. That might sound odd on HN where people tend to have a lot more disposable income.

rayiner 14y ago

I don't get the negativity either. If you look at the architecture manual, this is like a cheap Tilera. It's an interesting programming model (lots of cores in a shared memory SMP with weak memory ordering), and the CPU's are pretty vanilla RISC architectures. For $99, it's a great way to play with something that has the properties of the kinds of CPU's you might see in a future supercomputer.

new299 14y ago
I wrote my notes up here last time this was doing the rounds: http://41j.com/blog/2012/10/my-take-on-the-adapteva-parallella/ http://41j.com/blog/2012/10/my-take-on-the-adapteva-parallel... I'm pretty skeptical, having played with the Tilera I'm not sure it gives you enough of a benefit to warrant the extra effort. The Parallella also looks a lot like a Tilera, I do wonder if there might be IP issues there down the line. I also still think our best bet for this kind of thing is multicore ARM systems.
m_mueller 14y ago
Not to take away anything from Parallela, but you can also get to play around with something that's used in today's supercomputers by buying any Geforce 5xx and start programming in CUDA. A fully documented ARM architecture as an accelerator chip is certainly interesting though. It will take time until the software tooling catches up, but the initial buzz in the HPC community about those ARM newcomers is certainly there. I'd give them a good chance in the long run to outrun Intel MICs and catch up to NVIDIA Tesla. What I'd like to see next is a PCI express expansion card using this technology. See, one of the great benefits about Tesla cards is that you can swap them out in your supercomputers just like you do it with RAM - and you get the newest chip architecture, as long as your PCI bus can handle the load. For multi purpose systems you often still like to have a good number of x86 cores in there however.

fmstephe 14y ago

I am very happy to see this coming out. The negativity found here is really disappointing. I will be very happy to get hold of a good number of cores running with a hardware memory model that is more out-of-order than x86. Sounds like a glorious playground :)