41–50 of 89 posts
Does anyone know what kind of cores these RISC cores will be? Will it be some lower end ARM version, or MIPS? Will it be something for which a wide array of tooling already exists, or will this have its own custom architecture which only works with their toolchain?
Without commenting on the merit of this project, I'm alarmed to see a VC-backed making a Kickstarter pitch.
could you expand?
And yes I get that it's open source blah blah blah, but this project is certainly part of the plan for an institutionally-funded business to make money. Adapteva is a .com, not a .org.
Separately: if Adapteva is only 8 months from delivering completed product to users, shouldn't they be able to raise more funds through traditional channels? They clearly have/had VC buy-in and can raise through institutional channels. If they are just finishing the final debugging/SDKs/etc. at this point, it's not a good sign that they can't raise another $750k from their existing backers to cover final launch costs.
I don't have a horse in this race, but it doesn't feel quite right to me.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
OpenCL SDK support is provided. They also have a C/C++ compiler with OpenMP support. edit: No OpenMP support.
Sounds pretty good, thanks for the heads up. Now I'm curious to see some benchmarks as soon as someone puts 20 or 30 of these on a board with lots of GDDR 3 Ram :).
anyone who wants to crunch massive amount of data or utilize ridiculous amount of cpu cycles can spin up multiple instances in the cloud.
I would totally agree that memory constraint is sort of tied to manycore architectures, but in this case I find it pushed to the limits.
I think folk need to stop abusing the term "supercomputer". It is not really a performance designation. It doesn't define a certain architecture or design. It is pretty clearly an economic designation.
I agree that people tend to abuse the term, but I think it is a performance designation. It's just a sliding performance target. A supercomputer is a computer that can achieve the upper limits of what has been achieved in performance.
In general: money. Buying more of the most performant equipment available.
So. It's an economic designation.
I picked up a raspberry Pi a few days ago. Initially, I was blown away by the low price point. Since then, I've been reflecting on what makes a computer useful. For personal computers - desktops and laptops - I think we don't have a shortage of processor cycles. The minimal specs of the Raspberry Pi make it useable - 256MB of RAM, 700 MHz CPU, a few GB of storage and enough MB to saturate a home broadband connection.…
The real value is in pushing forward a general compute device with many cores. Overall our programs are still stuck in the 1-2 thread era, and there is a bit of a chicken/egg problem. Without a very effective multicore processor, the payoff in writing parallel programs is small. GPGPU is still to expensive and not very practical due to memory constraints and the GPU/system memory bottleneck. This probably wont be the…
I picked up a raspberry Pi a few days ago. Initially, I was blown away by the low price point. Since then, I've been reflecting on what makes a computer useful. For personal computers - desktops and laptops - I think we don't have a shortage of processor cycles. The minimal specs of the Raspberry Pi make it useable - 256MB of RAM, 700 MHz CPU, a few GB of storage and enough MB to saturate a home broadband connection.…
The real value is in pushing forward a general compute device with many cores. Overall our programs are still stuck in the 1-2 thread era, and there is a bit of a chicken/egg problem. Without a very effective multicore processor, the payoff in writing parallel programs is small. GPGPU is still to expensive and not very practical due to memory constraints and the GPU/system memory bottleneck. This probably wont be the…
Back in 06, I remember seeing fear in the eyes of some hardware and software engineers. In the next year, we were supposed to have 100 cores in our plain old desktops. How the heck are we going to program them? I found the situation a bit irrational. Every talk started with the death of Moore's Law because we couldn't shrink dies any further. More cores was posited as the only solution. Except, no one could code them for general purpose apps like Word, Excel, etc. In retrospect, I wonder why I don't have 100 cores in my desktop in 2012. I suspect because they aren't useful for average joe user.
P.S. Forgive my directionless rambling. I don't have a particularly strong opinion on this subject anymore.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The real value is in pushing forward a general compute device with many cores. Overall our programs are still stuck in the 1-2 thread era, and there is a bit of a chicken/egg problem. Without a very effective multicore processor, the payoff in writing parallel programs is small. GPGPU is still to expensive and not very practical due to memory constraints and the GPU/system memory bottleneck. This probably wont be the…
If by "expensive" you mean "time-consuming to implement algorithms on" then, yes, GPGPU is still expensive. The cards themselves, though, are stupidly cheap. For $140 you can get a card with 700+ general purpose shaders that run at around 800MHz.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The real value is in pushing forward a general compute device with many cores. Overall our programs are still stuck in the 1-2 thread era, and there is a bit of a chicken/egg problem. Without a very effective multicore processor, the payoff in writing parallel programs is small. GPGPU is still to expensive and not very practical due to memory constraints and the GPU/system memory bottleneck. This probably wont be the…
I used to feel exactly what you say. In 2006, when I first encountered the cell processor inside the PS3, my eyes popped. I found it extremely challenging to write useful software. The asymmetric architecture was a big culprit. I briefly looked into the dev environments offered by the likes of Rapid Mind but gave up. This didn't feel like general purpose computing. Back in 06, I remember seeing fear in the eyes of so…