Parellella - $99 super computer on Kickstarter

[Exophase]

I don't have the faintest idea what kind of software you can run on it. You can do a software renderer but it'll suck hard compared to what a competent mobile GPU can do. These cores would be awful at rasterization, texturing, and pixel packing.


I actually didn't realize that the Cortex-A9s were coming from a separate SoC, one of those Zinq chips no less. I'd sooner buy it just for that. I'm amazed they can manufacture all this for only $99, they must be getting some really good prices from Xylinx.

 

[monstercameron]

what about video transcoding, raytracing or tile based 3d rendering?

 

[Exophase]

Video transcoding: Fixed function hardware on SoCs does it much better.


Raytracing: Nowhere close to fast enough for real time results that look better than awful.


Tile based 3D rendering: My description for it sucking at software 3D was under the implicit assumption that it'd be tile based, that's a given.


Current-gen mobile GPUs are already reaching the point where they offer more FLOPs than this does. Exynos 5 also offers more w/the CPU alone (8 FLOP/cycle * 1.7GHz * 2 cores = 27.2 GFLOP/s) and it's much, much more easily utilized. Getting the Parallela to do more than spend most of its time waiting for memory operations to complete is going to be an absolute nightmare.

 

[monstercameron]

what about the epiphany 4 64 core version? how useful would that be?

 

[Exophase]

In those three things you listed? No more practical. Not like they're going to hit that stretch goal in 3 hours.


This is a solution looking for a problem. If great applications were obvious they probably wouldn't need to promote it this way.

 

[elwing]

what about the epiphany 4 64 core version? how useful would that be?

no idea, but since they didn't reached their 3million stretch goal, no one who didn't paid 5000$ will now...


edit: hum, I didn't saw they updated the pledge level, it was possible near the end to get a 64core one for only 750$


to me it seems that theses 16-64 core version are not powerfull enough to justify writing specific application for this hardware for the vaste majority of the people who bought it... now if they can really pull out a 1k core chip in 2014 that'd be something else...

 

[craigix]

I think that this KS was even more nerve wracking than ours.


I can't help watch other projects now, I saw one make it by a few $ to $50k a while ago, they literally got the final $100 in the last seconds.