by piotr5 » Mon Jan 18, 2016 11:40 pm
sorry, didn't notice my reply was feeding the trolls. (by feeding trolls I mean igniting controversy which wouldn't be necessary since I know very well that what I say is not applicable with current methods of technology.) guess I should have said up front: electronics is something I clearly know nothing about. my argumentation was purely from a point of view based on naked numbers, without taking context into account.
but to undo my reply: epiphany is no competition to knights-corner. from the point of view of programming, epiphany's on-chip memory is limited and external memory is expensive in bandwidth especially for 64-core. programming knight's corner is probably much easier. also complexity of instruction-set differs, as epiphany is optimized for lower power-consumption while intel had ease of use in mind. programming without a cache is difficult even if there is software-cache mechanisms. so in terms of what I do know about there does not seem to be any usecase where epiphany pcie card would actually beat intel. I suspect that also research-/production-costs couldn't be lower than the costs intel has for its own products, with their long experience on the market. you'd need to add other innovations into the final product, innovations intel didn't think of yet. and even then it is questionable if a market for this kind of products will actually exist in future as, again from point of view of programming, the focus is more on cell-phones and remotely running programs on hardware which likely has no pcie slot at all. if you're rich maybe you could try it, circumstances can change and maybe innovation will come to you. but for adapteva the risk of waiting for miracles to happen is too high. they already have a sufficiently successful product...