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