Your every day computer user

[Ioan]

Hi.

Thank you for your work.

I am looking for practical applications of the Parrallella board, from the point of view of the non-programming consumer (a secretary, or even a system administrator, for instance).

The Kickstarter advert contains a portion talking about "the guy who just wants an awsome computer for $99, that has more performance than anything out there". I would like to get this "awsome" a bit more defined. While the "cool" part is interesting, it's the practical that really matters.

I actually saw a Ubuntu desktop running on a Parallella setup and that would definitely seem practical, if it offers cheaper computing power than conventional non-embedded office computers. For example, does Ubuntu perform better on a current Parallella hardware than on a typical 2-Core or 4-Core machine office computer with 2-8GB of RAM?

Thank you.
With consideration,
Ioan.

[LamsonNguyen]

In this usage case, only the dual-core ARM A9 processor would be used, since no mainstream applications are capable of utilizing the Epiphany co-processor yet. Along with only 1 GB of RAM, I would say it would not be better than a typical workstation. However, it would suffice if all you will do is word processing and browsing the web. And let us not forget that this is a fairly substantial step up from the Rasberry Pi as well!

[Ioan]

Thank you for the clarification.

I am wondering if the Parallella comunity set it as a goal to run a typical OS (like Ubuntu) and actually make use of all its hardware co-processing power. As you may have already figured out, I am approaching the issue more from a marketing point of view.

[shodruk]

Parallella is NOT a PC.
It is an embedded system development board, just for development, not for office application, gaming, www browsing, etc.

[9600]

[six_string_bass]

[tnt]

Well, the two ARM core will work as a desktop computer, but it will have nowhere near the performance of a i5/i7 intel or something like that. It'd be more on par with the processing power of a recent tablet, except it doesn't have a good GPU (so no 3d accel, no hw mp4 decompression, ...). And if you use it that way, the epiphany chip (16core acceleator) will be just sitting there doing nothing.

The "general usage" of the board, I see as more of a long term goal when a lot of applications have been adapted to use that kind of architecture and this is most likely going to take a while.