Some questions and assumptions from a hardware n00b

[jlambrecht]

Hello,

I hope not to make too much of a fool of myself asking these question.

I've found this http://www.logicbricks.com/Solutions/EP ... rator.aspx which should work with the parallella board based Z-7010/7020

Adapteva and Parallella surely know how to get the enthousiasm flowing Since i hold no CS degree and have little knowledge on computer and especially processor design i hope to clarify a few things about the parallella board and the epiphany co-processor.

* The board itself has one co-cpu mounted, will there be other designs for this board ? One example i can think off is a board with a number of slots on it to plug epiphany daughterboard co-cpu's into.

* The Z-7010 seems to have quite a few more powerful models in it's line, will there be boards built with these or is this beyond the design limits ? Are there other reasons why for example the top of the line Z-7100 should not show any immediate benefit ?

* Based on what i learned so far, the epiphany co-processor and it's SDK appear to be quite specific in terms of possible use-cases. If comparison to the Tilera SDK, it is said programs to require a simple recompile for applications to benefit from Tilera's cpu design.

Will the Paralella SDK evolve in a similar fashion ? I'm no expert but would porting ( or extending ) some essential libraries not greatly speed up non-parallell specific programs ? Based on what i've read i assumed the Parallella SDK was already providing GNU gcc tuned for it's processor.

* I thought of using such a board to run a website crawler + indexing engine paired with some other services. Apparently at this point there's no benefit at all from the Epiphany co-processor, though AFAIK indexing relies heavily on floating-point processing.

* I'm not sure on how to read the presence of the FPGA, to what advantage can it be used by non-programmers ?


Kind Regards,


Joris

[9600]

[jlambrecht]

Thanks for the informative reply. I might be a bit too old ( just 40 really ) but i'm anxious on learning how to port or assist in porting with the Epiphany SDK. I'm afraid it is out of reach at this time and substantial parts of the related sources would need rewriting. I assume if libc6 and other critical libraries would be ported to run natively on the Epiphany this would permit for great performance increases across the line. Not that i'd be able too but i'm curious to learn the current state of any such projects.

I'm confident adapteva and parallella has drawn the attention required to make for a great platform and i hope to see it in many iterations.

I was on Tilera's heels as soon as they gained publicity, at the time Tilera's claim was they had tools at hand which would make porting applications trivial. I believe their claim was porting snort could be done with a simple recompile ( including the required libs etc ) for it to benefit from the many-core platform they offered. I've reread parts of the site i could find and this claim seems to be somewhat tuned down.

Anyway, i hope to have a budget for the Parallella + GPIO version once orders are accepted again, i missed the first batch. One can only learn by doing is it not. Please keep at least one Parallella product in this price range

[9600]