Epiphany uses

[Marcus D.]

What kind of applications would Epiphany excel at compared to GPGPU?

[Hoernchen]

It excels at power consumption, and when your tasks are not entirely "embarassingly parallel" because the epiphany CPUs are independent and can branch without having to wait/mask stuff.

[Marcus D.]

Thanks. The power consumption is definitely a major plus!

So is it seen as the same as a CPU but better FLOPS/W performance?

After all, you can now get 16 x64 cores in a box now relatively easily if somewhat more expensive than a parallella board!

FPGA, I can understand.

Is it meant to sit somewhere between CPU and GPU in terms of ease of use?

[Gravis]

[aolofsson]

gravis,
Thanks for the favorable comparison of GPUs and Epiphany! Lots of good points. Sadly most folks these days get hung up on just quoting GFLOPS numbers.
Andreas

[Gravis]

[naeger]

[tnt]

GPU basically can execute a lot of threads in parallell (like thousands !), but they must pretty much all do the same exact task at the exact same time, just working on different data. So that's perfect for example to compute a filter on an image, because the exact same operation will produce each ouput pixel independently, only with different input pixels and you can launch thousands of // threads each processing a single output pixel.

Epiphany OTOH is much more parallell than CPUs because it has 16/64 cores, but much less than a GPU because you only get 16/64 threads. But those are not forcibly linked in anyway, each can execute completely different task.

(it's obviously a little simplified, but that's the general idea)

[LamsonNguyen]

Another way to think about it is that a GPU is a factory with each worker doing the same, small task requiring little skill. The Epiphany is like a group of 16/64 craftsmen whereby one person could work on a painting, another could build a chair, etc.

[Gravis]