When we set out to design the credit card sized Parallella board in 2012, we knew it was going to run hot. Five Watts is just too much power to suck out of a credit card with active cooling! We thought Parallella developers would have fun creating their own cooling solutions, but that turned out to be a poor assumption.. Finally last…
A couple of years ago, Ola Jeppsson started working on a 1024-core simulator as part of his Master’s Thesis at Chalmer’s University in Sweden. (advisor, Sally McKee). He picked up the project again in 2016 as part of the validation process of the 1024-core Epiphany-V. Debugging with the simulator is an order of magnitude easier than with hardware, so you should…
Thanks to a multi-year collaboration with the development tools group at Ericsson, Parallella is now leading the charge in FREE (as in FREEDOM and BEER) parallel debugging! An initial prototype of the debugger and visualizer was created in 2013, which was presented at EclipseCon, but we were never able to get it to a releasable state. Now thanks to a…
Thanks to another heroic integration effort from Ola Jeppsson, we now have a much improved Parallella Linux Distribution based on Ubuntu 15.04. (Note the name change from “pubuntu” to “parabuntu”) Here’s a selection of some of the pre-installed features: HDMI improvements (Thanks to Peter Saunderson and Ola Jeppsson) GDB Epiphany multicore support (Thanks to Pedro Alvez) EPYTHON parallel programming framework…
I am happy to report that we have successfully taped out a 1024-core Epiphany-V RISC processor chip at 16nm. The chip has 4.5 Billion transistors, which is 36% more transistors than Apple’s latest 4 core A10 processor at roughly the same die size. Compared to leading HPC processors, the chip demonstrates an 80x advantage in processor density and a 3.6x advantage in memory…
Ola Jeppsson has been very busy over the last few months pulling together and updating all the components for a major new Parallella headless SDK release. Those of you looking for the latest Ubuntu, Linux, GCC, and GDB will appreciate this release. Key updates include: Ubuntu 15.04 (stock linaro) Linux kernel 4.4 (stock) GCC 5.2 GDB 7.10 The new and improved…
Given how important chips are to modern society EVERYONE should understand and appreciate how they are made. Every field has its own set of terms, jargon, and acronyms (engineers love acronyms!). As you would expect, chip design is no different. If you are new to chip design, it might take you a few days to read through the Wikipedia entries for each one of…
[UPDATE 3/8/2016 We were not accepted into GSOC, but the Fossi Foundation has graciously agreed to take us under their wings. We will be accepting applications for the RISC-V and SDR projects] We are applying to 2016 Google Summer of Code as a mentoring organization. Below you will find a list of initial project ideas. If you are interested in…
By far the most amazing Parallella hobby project to date has been together by Patrick Cazeles from France! Patrick has put together a miniaturized “super hi-fi” jukebox. The box on the top is Patrick’s Parallella work, the box on the bottom in the picture is his old digital power amplifier. I had the pleasure of meeting Patrick at the last Parallella…
I am happy to tell you that we now have a neat little case for the Parallella board thanks to the outstanding work of Alex Paloranta! In the past the task of properly cooling the board was left up to the user. For some of you this was fine, but for many of you this was a showstopper. The goal…
