
What I learned building a parallel processor from scratch - webaholic
https://www.parallella.org/2015/02/22/what-i-learned-building-a-parallel-processor-from-scratch/
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justincormack
This presentation did not include the P&L slide he showed recently in
London[1] (excellent presentation at Monkigras). They took huge cashflow risks
and were very lucky to survive.

[1]
[https://twitter.com/justincormack/status/561128891348422657](https://twitter.com/justincormack/status/561128891348422657)

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adapteva
Yes, we were definitely lucky, although the cash flow risk wasn't on purpose!
Some things happened in that graph that were out of our control. The lesson
from that graph is don't count your money until is in the bank and don't sell
a product until it's on the shelves.

With only $6M raised, this whole venture is probably a 100 to 1 moonshot to be
honest with you.(although as an entrepreneur clearly I have to believe the
odds are better than that...). Calxeda raised $100M and went bust, Tilera
raised $150M and was sold for $50M, Tabular raised $200M and went bust, the
Cell processor supposedly cost $1B to develop, etc.

If you are interested, here is a long list of parallel processor efforts. All
of them failed to reached general purpose status:

[http://www.adapteva.com/white-papers/the-siren-song-of-
paral...](http://www.adapteva.com/white-papers/the-siren-song-of-parallel-
computing/)

~~~
agumonkey
From your history slides, I thought of Mill OoBC
[http://millcomputing.com/docs/;](http://millcomputing.com/docs/;) they share
the DSP roots, do you know them or their work ? they don't design many-core
cpus though.

ps: Also, I don't think there was mention of your previous work on the
Kickstarter page or boards, was it on purpose (NDA,...) ? Past projects like
these really give trust to future clients.

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agumonkey
I get https errors under firefox nightly, so just in case, use non https urls:

[http://www.parallella.org/2015/02/22/what-i-learned-
building...](http://www.parallella.org/2015/02/22/what-i-learned-building-a-
parallel-processor-from-scratch/)

slides [pdf]

[http://www.parallella.org/wp-
content/uploads/2015/02/chalmer...](http://www.parallella.org/wp-
content/uploads/2015/02/chalmers_andreas.pdf)

cached [html]

[https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https%...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https%3A%2F%2Fwww.parallella.org%2F2015%2F02%2F22%2Fwhat-
i-learned-building-a-parallel-processor-from-scratch%2F)

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yellowapple
Noticed this as well. Perhaps the site is using deprecated ciphers? That seems
to be the implication from the error message.

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kevin_thibedeau
The reality is that there are not many business uses for massively parallel
computation in a small package. This affects large FPGAs as well. The only
real market is in the defense industry where price is no object but it is also
a very risk averse industry and is unlikely to take a chance on a startup that
could go under at any time not to mention that it prefers parts fabbed on
special lines from approved vendors. Software shops aren't going to take a
risk on leaving the world they know and are more likely to bang their head
trying to make conventional DSPs work if a normal processor won't cut it.

~~~
Someone
_" The reality is that there are not many business uses for massively parallel
computation in a small package."_

Yet. People will want good voice recognition. Even if you cannot get that _in_
your phone, your provider will want an energy-efficient solution for running
voice recognition for millions of users simultaneously.

Further ahead is the babelfish.

Your phone also may want to use its cameras to figure out who is talking, and
adjust its noise suppression depending on the location of the speaker.

Finally, car manufacturers will want small, low-power, cheap stuff to build
their self-driving cars.

Hardware like this may strike the right balance between flexibility and power
use for problems such as these.

And yes, this may be too weird for most to take the risk of using it, but it
may take only one succesvol company to make the jump.

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jhallenworld
Interesting chip, but not even an SoC so I'm curious what the market will be.

It would be interesting to have a tile-based chip like this, but with an FPGA-
style I/O ring (I mean support many common interfaces including serdes-based
but also allow the interchip links). Perhaps you end up with a new form of
FPGA.

~~~
wmf
The way the presentation keeps mentioning IP makes me think that the chips are
just a demo and they want to license the IP to be embedded in someone's SoC.

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adapteva
The truth is that big market companies rarely if ever buy from chip startups.
With new technology, the best forward is to partner with a larger company and
license the IP. (see cognivue, mobile eye as great example in the automotive
market). Still, we will continue to sell our chips and boards to anyone who
wants them for as long as we are around.:-)

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wmf
Something is really wrong when it takes 12 weeks to design a chip and 11
months to fab it.

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sliverstorm
How long do you think it should take to fab?

28nm is pretty cutting edge (many, many steps) and has a number of customers
(competing for manufacturing line time).

It's a bummer, but it's a long process. Not to mention, each new chip you spin
is $$$, so it's not like you would iteratively fab many prototypes, even if
you had a fast turnaround time.

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wmf
I've heard that a fab run itself is 6 weeks, so maybe 3 months including
packaging sounds reasonable. 28nm Bitcoin ASICs have been done in that time
frame.

OTOH, if you can't get the fab time below 11 months maybe you should spend
more like 24 months on the design.

