tempted, what are its' prospects

[dobkeratops]

greetings.
I only just discovered the Parallella board. My background is low-level gamedev. I've been programming since the 8/16bit days as a kid, onto PS1,DC,PS2,xbox etc in my working life. I mostly use C++ these days.

Reading about it is giving me a nostalgic buzz - its' very reminiscent of CELL, and machines with local stores used to be quite common in the early days of 3d consoles. other systems exist in more of a continuum and reading about this is very reminiscent of getting a new console or computer for the first time back in the days when everything was *changing* quickly, not just evolving. (even mobiles felt more like a shrink of what we already had, rather than a revolution).

So , I'm quite tempted to get one, but cautious.

AGAINST-
(i)When cell came out it was incredibly exciting , but I've already seen how the programming model caused a lot of pain.

In the earlier days we had simpler engines & 'inner loops' that were fine tuned for various custom chips, but by the time we got onto PS3/CELL, we had large engines in C++ with complex data structures and these were really difficult to move onto a NUMA architecture. CELL was basically killed by both CPUs' going multicore/SIMD, and GPU's getting more general, and both had the benefit of hardware caches doing some of the work for you of distributing data between processors.

In particular, programming for CELL narrowed you into a niche in an era when graphics programming was becoming broader - these days you can get GL, Shader code on many platforms, and port C++ on many machines with ease; even if consoles still use proprietary rendering APIs, they're not a million miles away from eachother

(ii) there's tonnes of other exciting tech purchases & programming projects competing for my time and attention...

FOR-
(i) Although very reminiscent of CELL, its' still quite different in that these units can actually address each others memory, maybe it wont be *As* painfull to program? and it really is 'manycore', not this middle ground of 'a few cores'.

So it is still something quite unique I've not specifically dealt with.

(ii) There is a lot of buzz about new workloads that still aren't perfectly suited to either CPU's or GPUs .

I read about the need for new chips oriented for AI tasks, especially pattern recognition for robots & user-interfaces (e.g. speech recognition). I was getting paranoid that 'plain old' programming skills wouldn't map onto these new chips, with all the impending progress perhaps set to come from hardware design?

it could provide a completely new angle on algorithms I haven't yet dealt with. Hardware and software bounce off eachother.

(ii) I'm generally interested in low-power computers (being a big believer in Peak Oil), and I notice the cheap dev board is a 5W machine, boasting impressive capabilities for such an efficient device. Although, the 'GFLOPS' number needs to be compared to a GPU not a CPU perhaps.



Can anyone enlighten me further?
... either enthuse about what you can do with it, or conversely scare me off getting yet another distraction.

I notice there's distributed online computing projects - supercomputing.io ? .. is 'folding@home' ported ?
i.e. the worst that could happen is I could get one then just donate it to one of these if I don't find find myself using it much.

I notice another thread about "needing a new language"... all throughout the PS3's lifetime we had the same observation, but no such language ever appeared. (i've seen there might be support for erlang, and is there any interest from the Haskell community?

I've also been following the Rust programming language with great interest, its' like a cleaned up version of C++ with tweaks that I longed for back in the xbox360/ps3 days.. like better immutability..)

I've been dabbling with my own language project for different reasons (a cross between C++/Rust); thats' got nothing to do with NUMA but the scope for language evolution interests me a LOT. In some ways seeing this is like an opportunity to try things that I'd wished we could have attempted on the PS3..

I've also got another itch about building some sort of panoramic multi-camera setup , but that's for another post.

[9600]

[aolofsson]

[dobkeratops]