Why Fan?? Other Zynq boards lacks it

[suarezvictor]

There should be a way of configuring parallella to remove the fan need (i.e. slower clock, or anything like the other boards)
The parallella was designed with Digilent's Zynq "ZedBoard", which doesn't need a fan (see Adapteva's testing): http://www.adapteva.com/white-papers/pa ... -64-cores/

Similarly MicroZed board and others also removes that requirement.

What's the difference in the Parallella? The coprocessor is aimed for mobile applications where fans are not used. We should find a way of setting the parallella for avoiding the fan.

Any thoughts?

[tnt]

1) The picture you post doesn't even show a heatsink. Later zedboard do come with a heatsink attached
2) Those board are either much larger (zedboard) so they can more easily dissipate heat through the ground plane. Or with much less heat generating devices (microzed). The parallella has on the same surface a bunch of other chips that also generate heat (phy / dvi / usb / epiphany / ...)
3) Those board come with the FPGA doing nothing, so yeah in their idle state they're cool. But if you look at the documentation, you'll see they say the board might require a fan depending on the running design. The microzed even has a J4 connector labeled "Fan".

If you actually unload the FPGA and make it do nothing (no elink, no hdmi), then the board works fine with just a heatsink on it and no fan.

[9600]

Even though the power dissipation is only ~5 watts, it is a very compact board and as such difficult for one of this size to conduct away sufficient heat with only a small heatsink on the Zynq chip. However, as Andreas — and others here on the forum — have shown it is .

Regards,

Andrew

[ESI]

before ataching the heatsink to my parallella(kickstarter), I read the ID. If I remember correctly is saw ES, which means engineering sample. At work, I also worked with engineering samples of zc7020 and they got quite warm/hot. The production silicon, we are using now stays much cooler...