Can I use epiphany in stand alone without any LINUX os ?

[Darpand93]

Hello guys,
I have several doubts and confusions regarding Parallella board.
Earlier, I had an experience of working on Zedboard which has zynq 7000.
I have an application which runs on standalone OS in zynq 7000, so it it possible to use zynq in parallella on standalone ?
Can I use all 16 cores of Epiphany and 2 cores of zynq without any OS ?
or to use this board, i need an Operating system like linux, and then create applications on it ?
How to burn parallella for stand alone application ?
Can I have any tutorials for parallella programming in standalone mode ?
Can someone please clear this things. I have googled this but it was more confusing..
Thanks for the help.

[sebraa]

Yes, you can use the Epiphany without Linux, but to my knowledge, nobody has done this so far. Basically, you need to implement the software side of eLink communication yourself, the Linux driver should provide enough information on how to do this.

[Olaf]

Maybe you should clarify what your end-goal is?

Is it something that just loads an FGPA image and runs off pure hardware?

Linux is only there to give you tools to develop and connect to the networks, but you could technically design your own custom micro OS specific for loading a image, upload it to the FGPA and run. You of course must do that in assembly yourself.

[sebraa]

[aolofsson]

I am not a big fan of absolute statements. Although it may be possible on some architectures to get as high performance/code density with just C programming, it likely will require a significant investment in programming effort to convince the compiler. This is not just true for the Epiphany. I would be really interested in seeing some comparisons between the e-gcc and a compiler for arm/x86 (for the same C code). How close to peak do they run?

Here's an example of optimized C code for Epiphany for a sobel filter by @jar

https://github.com/parallella/pal/blob/ ... sobel3x3.c