Seems there is some interest in this chip, and the board. As you said Henry, state machines would run very quickly in parallel - I had some wad arguing that an FPGA is the only thing you need, but nothing beats a hard core for hard tasks. Grid it up in parallel, times sixteen, and thats a fair bit of processing power.
I have already sent a few people emails concerning this, independently of the list, to garner their opinions. Out of four people, only one has replied, I suppose, Australia is on the other side of the world to most of you guys, time zones and all. But I'm going to make an open call - if a GSoC mentor in parallelism could be found, willing to advise the project, could this be a GSoC project? I suppose I should tender the idea on the wiki, but I'd rather not. Never played with wiki's, nor had the interest to try. Too busy designing robots. Tried a TAFENSW Moodle once, that was bad enough. On Wed, Feb 5, 2014 at 5:32 PM, Henry Millican <he...@tehserv.net> wrote: > Parallella seems very cool. I'll probably pick one up when I have free > time. > > I've worked with the Zynq chip on board, which is also great. For $99 it's > one hell of a dev board, considering you get an FPGA with hard ARM cores, > as well as the Ephiphany chip. > > The Ephiphany processor fills in the gap between CPU and FPGA tasks in my > opinion. Things that would require complex state machines on an FPGA could > be done in parallel on the RISC cores very easily (and quickly). I can > imagine doing some image processing or something (that doesn't lend itself > well to FPGAs) of the like with this. > > I'll be following you guys and may have time to contribute, but I am just > a hardware guy after all. > -- > > Henry > > > On Tue, Feb 4, 2014 at 10:20 PM, Shane Morris <edgecombe...@gmail.com>wrote: > >> Oh, its ok. I like the GSoC idea. I just don't think I'm GSoC material, >> I'm hardware type, even if I will be a uni student this year going forward >> - "If it draws blood, its hardware" as the old maxim goes. >> >> The Parallella board is US$99, a far more modest investment in hardware >> than a GizmoBoard as I had previously suggested, and packs more power for >> the price, in terms of coding value. Whether it could be accepted as a >> coding project of the type for GSoC, a mentor for it found, and other >> logistical concerns are a issue for the GSoC organisers, but I suppose, >> could it happen? >> >> An abstract topic for the time being. >> >> >> On Wed, Feb 5, 2014 at 5:06 PM, <lu...@proxima.alt.za> wrote: >> >>> > Thoughts? Comments? Critique? Flames? >>> >>> I guess this is the real value of efforts like GSOC, if only they >>> could be extended to a much greater public either with an infinite >>> budget or by pushing a far more socially-aware ethos. >>> >>> I'll refrain from pontificating further. >>> >>> ++L >>> >>> >>> >>> >> >
