3 ms·
The 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 intens
by solarexplorer 12y ago
The 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.
- daniel-cussen 12y agoParent asked about energy consumption, not speed. You can program in floating point (I'm doing just that, with 6 cores performing Karatsuba-3 multiplication of 54-bit elements) but that is quite a bit slower than hardware DP multing (which Parallella boards lack too). FP multing will likewise be slower than hardware FP multing, which Parallella does have.
- solarexplorer 12y agoSure, you can do floating point in software. My point is that dedicated hardware is very likely more power efficient at it. The same goes for memory: accesses to off-chip memory cost much more energy than accesses to on-chip memory. It would be very interesting to get energy and performance numbers for some real world application running on both chips.