[Arm-netbook] Adapteva Parallella: Thoughts?

[Andrew M.A. Cater]

On Fri, Dec 23, 2016 at 07:20:05AM +0000, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
> ---
> crowd-funded eco-conscious hardware: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68
> 
> 
> On Fri, Dec 23, 2016 at 7:02 AM, John Luke Gibson <eaterjolly at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Obviously it's been mentioned before, since it's on the <a
> > href=http://rhombus-tech.net/adapteva/>wiki</a>.
> > There isn't much information on the page however.
> > The core doesn't work standalone, however it is completely open with
> > an HDL and a schematic; it is in the direction that a puristic libre
> > system would be if not "technically" all the way there. The board
> > itself has both(I think?) an arm and a x86 on board, simply because
> > adapteva is too new to have enough libraries ported for a full os (I
> > think?).
> > Now their boards are $99 which is a jump from $40, so my question
> > would be was price differential the reason why it wasn't included or
> > where there too many compatibility/tooling issues?
> 
>  i believe i spoke to them (it may have been a different company), if
> i recall correctly (which i probably don't) their core PCB (which they
> haven't released) is 12-layer, which means "insanely expensive to
> produce".
> 
>  mostly it's down to practicality of cost, and time.  if people offer
> to *pay* for these boards to be made, i'll get them done, no problem.
> 

Lovely board, lots of potential - but no community because it's hard
to program the fast cores - lots of low level C programming to make
best use of it, though someone did do a GNURadio port for Google
Summer of Code a while back

I was a Kickstarter backer - but chickened out of the significant
porting effort needed. The orignal Kickstarter board came without
significant heatsinking so needed extra fan cooling. There was
an Ubuntu port for it - and it would probably run Debian with no
huge problem - armhf.

It's an ARM, FPGA and then however many Epiphany cores - Anders
Olofssen (? spelling ?) built his ideal system for signal
processing tasks because he couldn't find the necessary for his
Ph.D - the paraphrase on lack of community is from his site.

Ericsson and others have, however, funded additional R&D so
they've got to 1024 core boards. Really useful for a compact
supercomputer / specialist 5G hardware but fairly tough
for pretty much everybody else to get a toehold because the
initial learning curve is non-trivial.

Andy C.


> l.
> 
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