Re: [9fans] Inferno and the Parallella

[Shane Morris <edgecomberts@gmail.com>]

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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 <henry@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 <edgecomberts@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, <lucio@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
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>

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