The launch of the Raspberry Pi has been a huge success story, and promises to get cheap computers into the hands of kids and hobbyists around the world. But it has also had another effect?it has inspired others to look into alternative methods of developing cheap computing platforms.
One company taking inspiration from the Raspberry Pi Foundation is Adapteva, which focuses on semiconductor technology and has developed a very efficient multicore microprocessor architecture. Now they intend to use that architecture to offer up a $99 supercomputer with the help of Kickstarter.
The project is called Parallella, with the main aim being to make parallel computing open and accessible to everyone at a very cheap price point. Adapteva intends to do this by using its Epiphany RISC processors, which promise up to 45GHz of CPU performance using only 5 Watts and fitting on a board the size of a credit card.
The Parallella computer itself combines the ?Epiphany Multicore Accelerator? consisting of 16 or 64 cores, with a dual-core ARM A9 processor, 1GB RAM, MicroSD, USB 2.0, HDMI, Ethernet, and Ubuntu Linux. It?s also a completely open platform, meaning everything is open source including the architecture and the SDK.
Pledging $99 on Kickstarter gets you a 16 core Parallella and 13GHz of? performance along with all the tools required to start developing software? on the board. And Adapteva isn?t kidding about the size of the device. The final Parallella will measure just 3.4 x 2.1-inches.
In order for the Parallella Kickstarter to be a success it has to reach a funding target of $750,000. Such a high target has been set due to the costs involved in retooling a chip foundry and mass producing the processors. But once that?s achieved the cost of the chips will fall to just a few dollars due to thousands of then fitting on a wafer.
With 29 days to go the Kickstarter has only reached $23,311, so it?s unclear if this project will happen. However, even if there aren?t enough individuals willing to pledge, one or two companies may step in and help get it to 750K if they think Parallella is worthwhile to their business interests.
More at Kickstarter
Source: http://www.geek.com/articles/chips/99-parallella-supercomputer-appears-on-kickstarter-20120928/
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