
Parallella 'supercomputers' headed to early backers - SonicSoul
http://www.engadget.com/2013/07/23/parallella-production-boards-shipping-pre-orders-open/
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rjsw
The boards also look to be really good value as an FPGA development platform
with 32-bit RAM, USB, Ethernet and HDMI.

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3amOpsGuy
I agree, it's one of the factors that tipped me into pre-ordering (no word on
my delivery yet though!)

There doesn't appear to be that much spare capacity, at least on the 7010's
FPGA, around 2k cells IIRC? Certainly won't be creating a bitcoin miner in
that :-)

Still the most interesting bit of hardware to come down the pipe yet.

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ZenoArrow
"There doesn't appear to be that much spare capacity, at least on the 7010's
FPGA, around 2k cells IIRC? Certainly won't be creating a bitcoin miner in
that :-)"

Depends on whether you'd like to use the Epiphany chip or not, as the FPGA
logic used to interface with the Epiphany can be used for your own projects
too (albeit with the catch that you lose the ability to access the full
potential of the Epiphany chip). I'd be interested in using the Parallella
board as a cheap Zynq dev board.

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jrn
I think the hdmi implementation takes up most of the fpga, the epiphany
interface footprint is quite small.

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ZenoArrow
Good to know. I'm surprised they've gone down that route, suppose they're got
to cut costs somewhere.

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melling
I remember that the early comments were pretty negative on the Parallella.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5557985](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5557985)

[http://41j.com/blog/2012/10/my-take-on-the-adapteva-
parallel...](http://41j.com/blog/2012/10/my-take-on-the-adapteva-parallella/)

How does the product rate now that it's finished? I bought one and I think it
should be shipping in the next week or two. My feeling was that good or bad,
supporting the Kickstarter campaign might help spur the industry just a tad
bit faster. We really seemed to have stalled on multi-core general purpose
computers.

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pjmlp
> We really seemed to have stalled on multi-core general purpose computers.

We need better languages and paradigms to explore them.

The increase in FP and actors/CSP model use might help, but developers still
need to learn how to use these tools effectively.

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graue
Has there been any news about running Erlang on one? I remembered seeing blog
posts about it, but when I went back and looked, both were "coming soon" posts
with no code.

I'm one of the backers, and honestly have no idea how I'll use the thing, but
Erlang support would at least be cool to play with.

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ZenoArrow
Probably the best place to keep track of Parallella development is on the
forums. There is a Erlang subforum there too, though no news of an Erlang
build that makes use of the Epiphany yet AFAIK...
[http://forums.parallella.org/viewforum.php?f=14&sid=d235e45f...](http://forums.parallella.org/viewforum.php?f=14&sid=d235e45f220f2b6aa82423b85c413e2c)

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dkhenry
I am super excited about getting my board. Not because its some amazing piece
of kit ( GPU's are currently better), but I think their architecture will be
awesome if they can scale it up.

