[Arm-netbook] parallella

[Ken Phillis Jr]

On Tue, Jul 23, 2013 at 5:11 PM, luke.leighton <luke.leighton at gmail.com> wrote:
> http://www.parallella.org/board/
>
> those people who've been on here a while will remember the discussions
> going over the zync 7000 series, and how it might make a great EOMA68
> CPU Card... except with no GPU it'd be commercially very difficult to
> justify... but what i really want to know is why the heck didn't it
> occur to me *months* ago that the adapteva parallella would make an
> absolutely stonking open hardware GPU.  i mean... it's already got
> OpenCL: how hard would it be to put OpenGL on it as well??
>
> l.
>
I have taken a look at the specs and found that the Epiphany-II is
highly customized where you can use more than one configuration
approach. If you do not want to port the complete OpenGL ES ( Software
based) stack on mesa, the alternative option is to ask the question of
"What is the smallest/cheapest FGPA you can use to interface the GPIO
on the ARM SOC?" [1]  If you can answer this well you can make full
use of the Allwinner A10/A20 SOC ( powered by an MALI GPU ) and gain a
lot of power from the Parallela chips.

As for Implementing OenGL on the Parallela chips, you need to make a
base using the LLVMpipe[2] project that Mesa has and then use this API
to make use of the Epiphany SIMD codes.

[1] http://www.adapteva.com/products/silicon-devices/e16g301/
[2] http://www.mesa3d.org/llvmpipe.html