This board is interesting in part because it has an array of parallel CPUs on it, but also it has dual-core ARM and a 32-bit-wide DDR3 RAM, on a chip with FPGA capability (the Zynq7010) - so could be a suitable platform for tinkering with CPU designs.





Presently available to those who sponsored the kickstarter but intended to be $99 retail. Perhaps late this year?

Parallella Overview


via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5557985

I didn't examine the GitHUB repository extensively, but it appears Parallela's developers have released a set of Verilog FPGA interfaces.

I've been looking for prices of the newer Xilinx FPGA SoC offerings, like the Zynq series. Been difficult to find at distributors like Avnet. I assume that Xilinx is still trying to work out the bugs through a very limited release strategy. After all, the Zynq family has been around for at least 6 months now.

This is interesting stuff. A simple search led me to the explanation of a 64 core here. They geared it towards C/C++.

I've received a lot of criticism for posting about it on other forums and some of the Xmos users helped me to put it into perspective a little.



The question is whether you can devise algorithms that can make good use of the Epiphany architecture.

http://www.xcore.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=13009#p13009
http://www.natami.net/knowledge.php?b=6 ... order=&x=0

Or the question is whether you could put together a Core i7 design nearly as small, cheap or low-power...

It's clear that the major idea here is to get to 64 cores or more. The 16-core device is an early iteration meant to get things going.

Cheers
Ed

I see they have recently taped-out a 1024-core version, called Epiphany-V.

1024 64-bit RISC processors
64-bit memory architecture
64-bit and 32-bit IEEE floating point support
64 MB of distributed on-chip SRAM
1024 programmable I/O signals
Three 136-bit wide 2D mesh NOCs
TSMC 16FF process
4.56 Billion transistors, 117mm^2 silicon area

Tape-out means the design is final and is sent to mask-making. Then the masks go to the fab, and eventually chips come out the other end. "Chips will come back from TSMC in 4-5 months."

Announcement page:
https://www.parallella.org/2016/10/05/e ... processor/

HN discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12645661

Technical report: http://www.parallella.org/docs/e5_1024core_soc.pdf
(Contains lots of info about the implementation, including the amount of effort it took.)

From the HN discussion:

- the $99 board has sold around 10,000 units. Believed to be priced too high to get substantial volume.
- this new chip is going to be lower volume and much higher cost. Not for hobbyists
- Architecture reference at http://adapteva.com/docs/epiphany_arch_ref.pdf