Parallella Community

I'm sure that if you took a look at the documentation for it and Parallella you could very easily ascertain the differences. The most obvious one being that OpTiMSoC systems will be soft-core based and as such, even without taking the architectural differences into account, you can be fairly sure that performance will be down on Parallella. That is perhaps, unless you can afford some pretty expensive FPGAs... But now I'm wandering off into the realm of conjecture.

This is not to say that Parallella is "better" — because this depends entirely on what it is that you are trying to achieve!

Cheers,

Andrew

Optimsoc is less well documented, for a start!

However jokes aside, Epiphany and Optimsoc look to be similar solutions to a similar problem-set (embedded manycore SoC) and it could be that they could team up to support the same APIs etc. The MCAPI communication API looks interesting, especially as it is a nascent standard.

Mark

Hi,

disclaimer: I'm one of the main developers behind OpTiMSoC, so my views might be biased

The goals of both projects are completely different. OpTiMSoC is not meant to be a production-ready system, we don't intend to build silicon from it. Instead, the goal is to provide a set of building blocks for us (and obviously others) to get started quickly when doing research on multicore systems or for teaching on those systems. Those building blocks are things like processor cores, Network-on-Chip, debug infrastructure (on-chip and off-chip), and all the tooling around it (toolchain, makefiles, scripts, simulation stuff).

You can then use these building blocks, put them together and get a System-on-Chip that is designed to your requirements (# of cores, hardware accelerators, interconnect, just to name a few). Since we don't build silicon, we have some other "targets" that you can run your designed SoC on, mainly simulation (such as ModelSim or Verilator) and FPGA boards.

As it turns out, you can use OpTiMSoC not only for research, but also to get a custom SoC design running on "soft hardware" (FPGA) rather quickly, similar to a Board Support Package for your FPGA. We know some people that have expressed the desire for such a system, and that's why we put the work into it to make it not only a research platform but open it up for a bit wider audience.

To summarize, Parallella and OptiMSoC are not competing "products", but happen to be two projects in the same "Multicore/Manycore SoC space" with rather different goals.

Philipp

PS: And I'm eagerly waiting for my Parallella board to arrive as well

soft hardware! that's quite interesting, it remind me of this.
http://tyom.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/usin ... -ship.html

i want more than qemu/verilog simulator, there is something in llvm/clojure IMHO.