Many questions about Parallella from a non programmer..

[Warmuser]

Hello, I'm really interested to the Parallela board because I need a powerful machine with an high level of efficiency. And I was considering to buy these board to doing stuff like realize audio and video editing, work with my blogs, make alot of researches with tons of multitasking all the time. Maybe also multimedia: 4k movies, gaming, 24bit audio and more, If it is possible.

I check the specs of the Parallella board. But I have some dubts, because these machine seems to have a different approach to the standard. There are many things that appear strange to me. So, I made a list of questions:

- Why Parallella comes only 1GB of SDRAM and not more?
- Why on the PCB there are not USB 3.0, SATA and jack audio 3,5 ports?
- What's the maxium resolution that these board can support?
- Is it compatible with the standard 24bit/192khz (If there is a way to reproduce audio)?
- What's the equivalent in video memory and cpu speed with the actual standards?
- Can these board be overclocked as the current Intel/AMD cpus?
- Where to connect the fan?
- There is a way to order these board from EU? And, where to buy a case?

Thanks.

[dobkeratops]

It's probably not suitable for you;
if you need power for todays applications (video editing, games,..), get a conventional CPU+GPU based computer .. x86 or ARM with nvidia or whatever; and if you like the small/low-power 'single-board-computer' formfactor you can get nice machines like the raspberry pi's. Traditional GPUs have been designed for games first and foremost - they are unbeatable for this.

The parallela is really a "devkit"/experimental tool for a specific type of parallel programming (different to GPGPU 'stream processing');

Basically the word 'core' would be misleading if you compare it with x86 or ARM - those are 'big cores' designed to be very versatile. these cores are more like GPU cores, but need to be programmed very differently. The parallela doesn't have a GPU. (it's also got some similarities to the CELL processor in the PS3, but remember that had a GPU aswell)

The point of this board is to develop the software that is needed for the next version. The Epiphany chip in the parallela is an unusual design that is very promising for supercomputers and AI (neural nets.. robotics, machine vision,..). The world is currently using GPUs for that, but that's "accidental" - The Epiphany is aiming at the new opportunity of a dedicated chip for this purpose.

The architecture is much more scalable, i.e. they can build bigger chips and combine more chips so they collaborate on at a much finer grain, compared to if you just bought a PC and stuck multiple GPUs cards in - e.g. they could build grids of 10s, 100s or 1000s of chips that behave as one.

In theory the architecture would be useful for the kind of tasks you're after - but the software doesn't yet exist, and they haven't released the 1024 core version yet. Right now for an end user, GPUs are the best devices

The 1024 core version will be about as powerful as high end GPUs, lacking graphics functions, but with some possible advantages for AI, and consuming less power so it's better in devices (e.g. drones, portables).

[Warmuser]

[sebraa]

VLC: there is no audio interface (no sound) and no GPU (video display is slow), and video decoding is too slow for HD
browser: many sessions require much memory, which you won't have
downloading: yes.

Choose a different machine. Parallella is not for you.

[Warmuser]

[olajep]

[sebraa]