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The 64-core Parallella is alive
- Everlag 12y agoI was informed a few days ago that my 16 core Parallella has shipped; I had hoped, when I ordered, that it would come earlier in the year before exams but the fact that it shipped- several kickstarters which did not deliver have made me wary- has me ecstatic to hold it in my hands. I have a great amount of respect for the Parallella team: to be able to kickstart a custom chip, that promises very interesting applications, and deliver it within several months of the estimated delivery date with the setbacks they have had is absolutely astonishing for me. While I can't comment on the quality of the final product yet, I would say that they know how to run an excellent campaign.
- teh_klev 12y agoMine shipped a few days ago as well. Sadly they seemed to have completely ignored my address change request and the board is shipping to my old address in another country. Grrr.
- wsh91 12y agoThey did the same thing to me, too. I live in California and my board has arrived safely in DC where I used to live. Unbelievable given the difference in timeline from what they originally set out.
- sitkack 12y agoI received my boards last week. The heatsink is for the zynq chip is kinda humorous.
- awda 12y agoIf you haven't heard of Parallella before (like me) and want to learn more: http://www.parallella.org/ http://www.parallella.org/ Edit: Ok, here's my quick summary. Please correct me if I'm wrong: This looks like a small PCB (raspberrypi-alike) that sits the main attraction: a 16- or 64-core Epiphany coprocessor, as well as an ARM cpu to run the OS. Not sure how these relate in performance to other coprocessors (GPUs with OpenCL?). Power draw seems low (5W). Would love to read more about the architecture, why Epiphany processors are special, etc.
- mintplant 12y agoMore info about Epiphany and its architecture can be found on Adapteeva's Wikipedia page [1]. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adapteva#Products http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adapteva#Products
- vidarh 12y agoIt's a dual ARM core Zynq SoC + the Epiphany. The Zynq has an on-die FPGA. Part of the FPGA is used for "glue" for the Epiphany, but you can update the FPGA config as well, with some care. The main CPU is substantially faster than the Pi, but it doesn't have HW accelerated graphics, so it's not a speed daemon for desktop/workstation type use. As for the Epiphany, assume that it'll be slower than most GPU's for tasks that GPU's are good for. That is, if you can make do with few instruction streams, the Epiphany is not well suited for it, as most GPUs will blow the current chips out of the water in terms of performance. If, on the other hand, your problem is poorly suited for GPUs due to lots of independent instruction streams, it may be better suited. One of the most interesting aspects of the Epiphany is that is can also be connected into a grid - each chip has four high speed links that can be connected to other Epiphany chips, or be used to interface with the main CPU or off-chip memory. The cores can all access each-others memory without any special instructions, including that of the cores on other Epiphany chips that are hooked up via the external links - the only difference between in-core and out-of-core memory access is the speed.
- bitL 12y agoExcellent! Congratulations! Can't wait to get my hands on the 64 core version! :-)
- andyl 12y agoIs Parallella alive? I put in an order more than 18 months ago and still nothing. Related question: is Erlang running on Parallella yet? I remain very interested - 64 or even 16 cores on a small form factor would be incredible.
- rposborne 12y agoYup, they just shipped mine on saturday. Think they are about to backer 3000 now.
- qdog 12y agoI can confirm they have made it to backer #3811 as of last Friday for shipping, hoping it arrives sometime this week.
- wtracy 12y agoMine arrived last Saturday, so I can confirm it does exist!
- vidarh 12y agoI have received my two. They're still working through the backlog.
- acomjean 12y agoI got mine today. I don't have the video cable yet and still have to attach the heat sink. They'd really like you to have a fan, so I have some work to assemble one. http://www.parallella.org/quick-start/ http://www.parallella.org/quick-start/
- vidarh 12y agoIt does work with just the heat sink, but if you want to keep it on for extended periods, the fan is probably a good idea. I can recommend this kit for a case/fan: http://shop.abopen.com/ http://shop.abopen.com/ - that fan is enough to keep everything feeling cool to the touch. The design is on Github too, if you want to do your own (and if nothing else the instructions shows you how to hook up a 5v fan directly to the board) It takes some assembly and very light soldering, but not more than that you can get away with any crappy soldering iron and ideally a pair of wire cutters (but scissors will do)
- fragsworth 12y agoThey are making a critical mistake here by not letting users pre-order the next batch. It says "Sold Out" and you can't do anything else. They could make hundreds or thousands of sales over the next day or two due to their free launch publicity, but they're fucking blocking everyone from paying for it. Most of the folks like me who would have bought something today while reading about it will just forget about it later. These guys are missing out on a huge opportunity.
- onemore360 12y ago...or at least collect email addresses to email when the product is in stock.
- Istof 12y agohttp://www.parallella.org/parallella-updates-registration/ http://www.parallella.org/parallella-updates-registration/
- jdubs 12y agoI would also like to view their shop.... nvm, I can't read. http://shop.adapteva.com/ http://shop.adapteva.com/
- vidarh 12y agoConsider that the Parallella is not their intended product. The Parallella is a dev platform/proof of concept to get people to design the Epiphany into new products. They're not likely making money on the Parallella - in fact a lot of the delay for the Kickstarter campaign was due to issues related to cost (e.g. the design is cut to the bone, and they managed to eventually get very good pricing from Xilinx for the Zynq etc.). It looked like they were in trouble for a while until they got a cash injection from Ericsson and Carmel Ventures early this year. As such, while they'd certainly benefit from more exposure, and getting it in the hands of more people, they also have every reason to manage the process so building boards doesn't get in the way of actually evolving their chip designs etc. too.
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- avmich 12y ago> the 64-core Parallella is still setting the standard in terms of energy efficiency. In fact, it could be argued that it’s the most efficient computer in the world today I'd be curious if it beats GreenArrays (http://www.greenarraychips.com/ http://www.greenarraychips.com/) numbers of picojoules per operation. I wonder if those numbers are published for Parallela?
- vidarh 12y agoI'd be surprised if it did. The Parallella cores are far larger, with far more in-core RAM.
- daniel-cussen 12y agoI work a lot on GreenArrays, and I highly, highly doubt this claim. An F18 core has 1152 bits of SRAM on it, much less than these cores, which I believe I read have 32 KB. Moreover, while the Parallella is clocked (like almost every computer out there) the F18 is asynchronous. From reading the parallella docs, it looks like that chips runs 5 W on a "typical workload" while the GA144 runs .25 W at an absolute theoretical maximum, for a 20x difference in energy consumption. http://www.parallella.org/board/ http://www.parallella.org/board/
- solarexplorer 12y agoThe parallella supports floating point though. I don't know how fast the GreenArrays run, but a factor of 20 doesn't seem impossible for a floating point intensive program. More on-chip memory can be beneficial too, if it helps to avoid accesses to off-chip memory. Of course, the unqualified claim from parallella is pretty useless…
- avmich 12y agoThat's why I'm asking. GA144 has 144 cores - but they are 18-bit wide, and the instruction set is rather unorthodox, even multiplication usually has to be programmed. Code density is pretty high, it's a Forth chip after all - but I suspect it is hard to achieve a good uniform load across the whole device... which might also be the case with Parallela. So we have to consider each claim differently. In general, though, they seem to be quite different chips.
- kefka 12y agoAs a theoretical pie-in-the-sky question, what is the minimum amount of energy required to do an operation ?
- jacquesm 12y agoIf you are willing to reverse it the amount of energy can be 0 or a close approximation. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing Note that this is the computing equivalent of a straight line.
- damian2000 12y agoI was hoping to buy a few of their 16-core model for a commercial application, and have been in touch with Adapteva but got no reply. It seems like they really don't have the ability to supply the demand for their product.
- dnautics 12y agoas soon as julia gets running on ARM this is going to make for some monster high-level scientific programming kit.
- brucehart 12y agoI'm looking forward to getting mine. I ordered it back in October and they recently said the Zynq-2010 based boards would be shipped in mid-May. I wish they would have been more up front about the delays. There were long periods where there was no communication from the company. I didn't order through Kickstarter but directly from Adapteva.
- JoelHobson 12y agoWhat do you intend to use it for? Is there a hobbyist application for these?
- brucehart 12y agoI am interested in parallel computation and computer architectures and thought it would be fun to experiment with. I have worked on some projects developing signal processing algorithms for large GPU arrays and I want to see how the Parallela compares. I plan on implementing a real time audio watermarking algorithm and some image/video processing algorithms.
- fit2rule 12y agoI'd love to see someone design a unique synthesizer (audio) algorithm for these things - hope you'll keep HN updated with any progress you make in that direction.
- wcchandler 12y agoPardon the ignorance but are all 64 cores available to the OS -- as in, if I run htop, will I see 64 little bars at the top of the terminal? I would think not if I'm understanding this architecture correctly...
- wmf 12y agoI don't think an OS is intended to run on the Parallela chip at all; it's more of an accelerator.
- tostitos1979 12y agoDumb question. How is this different from the cell processor in the ps3?
- vidarh 12y agoThe Cell SPE's are not as general purpose. They're SIMD processors (single-instruction, multiple-data), and don't have transparent access to host memory or the other cores (for some of the Parallella demo's, you can exit the main program and watch the Epiphany cores continue to DMA data straight to the frame-buffer). They're more similar to a GPU than to the Epiphany. Each SPE is more powerful in terms of Gflops, but the Epiphany CPU's offer more independent instruction streams. If your problem is basically well suited for a GPU (easy to vectorize) chances are it will probably do better on a Cell than the current Epiphany's. If your problem has lots of independent branching, the Epiphany stands a better chance.
- zhemao 12y agoThe 64-core coprocessor has a different architecture than the main ARM processor. Kernel code and regular userspace programs won't run on it.
- markvdb 12y agoClueless newbie here. I see this thing does OpenCL on a completely different architecture. Recent tesseract ocr versions supports opencl. Will I be able to run tesseract on this thing? Would I even want to?
- foxhill 12y agoin principle, yes, but the parallela board isn't exactly the fastest of all the embedded boards. also, OpenCL apparently isn't the preferred programming model for the epiphany, so performance wont be as good as bare-metal (but that is practically a tautology for any OpenCL device..)
- izietto 12y agoWhat do you think about this + Haskell video encoder / decoder? I'm a little ignorant about media processing, but I guess it to be processors scalable with the right encoder / decoder, am I wrong?