Parallella: an Open Multi-Core CPU Architecture 103
First time accepted submitter thrae writes "Adapteva has just released the architecture and software reference manuals for their many-core Epiphany processors. Adapteva's goal is to bring massively parallel programming to the masses with a sub-$100 16-core system and a sub-$200 64-core system. The architecture has advantages over GPUs in terms of future scaling and ease of use. Adapteva is planning to make the products open source. Ars Technica has a nice overview of the project."
Comparisons... (Score:1)
Comparing it to Pi is a little disingenuous. Reading the copy suggests there is an ARM core, plus some number of co-processors (perhaps like the Cell and its SPEs). That would make it a non-general-purpose processor. To compare apple-to-apples, we'd have to know how it compare to modern GPUs.
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Comparing it to Pi is a little disingenuous. Reading the copy suggests there is an ARM core, plus some number of co-processors (perhaps like the Cell and its SPEs). That would make it a non-general-purpose processor. To compare apple-to-apples, we'd have to know how it compare to modern GPUs.
As for apples to apples, It's vaporware specs read similar to the old printout of the vaporware specs for the Propeller2 from microchip inc on my desk.
They are nearly identical situations, in fact, both small teams (the original prop was done by one guy, admitedly 6-7 years ago). Gigaflops/sec performance goals, etc.
As for which is the better vaporware product I think you're slightly better off with the parallella story than the prop2 story, but slow working silicon purchased online by CC and delivered by
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Propeller2 from microchip inc
Well that was embarrassing. That would be Parallax Inc, before the prop came out mid last decade (its old) they were famous for the basic stamp which I guess you'd call the Ardweeeeeeeno of 1990.
Microchip makes the PICs. I was thinking of something along the lines of instead of buying 8 cores of 80 mhz 2005 era propeller for $8, buy 8 PIC24's in 20 pin DIP packages (easy for noobs to prototype) for a bit over a buck a piece and tie the I/O lines together and learn the agonies of multi-processor interfacin
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Hardly vaporware, you can already buy these commerically if you don't mind spending as much as a fully loaded Airbook.
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>As for apples to apples, It's vaporware specs read similar to the old printout of the vaporware specs for the Propeller2 from microchip inc on my desk.
they have working 16 core silicon. they shared the cost of a 65nm wafer with other companies small run asics. this lowers the entry cost to making silicon, but gives a crazy high per unit cost. if they raise enough money to do a full wafer at 28nm, then it becomes cost effective. there are intersting details and numbers on page 3 of http://www.adapteva.co [adapteva.com]
Re:Comparisons... (Score:4, Interesting)
the devboard has a Dual-core ARM A9, so more like a pandaboard. even if you ignore the co-processor they are offering a lot for $99.
its interesting to compare the epiphany processor to a GPU. both give you lots of cores, GPUs get up ino the hundreds, epiphany is meant to scale to 4000. But a GPU is highly opitmised for graphics, and applying identical operations to millions of data values. in a GPU groups of core (typically 32) operate as a wavefront, if the code branches on an if stament, then the cores that get the else branch have to wait until the ones that follow the if finish.
epiphany has independant cores. you can send them each a different program. so for a much wider set of algorithms you can get efficient speedups. in a way it is more like the xeon phi, but without making each core a full x86 compatible processor.
Hmmm... (Score:2)
Re:Hmmm... (Score:5, Informative)
a GTX650 will give you 800GFLOPS for $100 and a GTX680 will give you 3TFLOPS for $500.
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A big problem here is that classical GPU:s only have two kinds of I/O ports: Video output, and PCI Express. Neither is very good for an embedded application, unless you have a big power budget and also have a board with an x86 processor. (Unfortunately you need x86 since you need binary drivers for your GPU to get good GPGPU performance...)
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If you have the power budget and space for one of these GPUs, then throwing a mini-ITX board in the mix is the sane solution. An AMD E-series platform is going to draw a small portion of what a modern top of the line GPU will require.
My problem with this is that it's not an underserved market: there's XMOS and Propeller have both been around for a while and neither sells in considerable volume.
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Yes, you may be right for your situation. I do not happen to have any system available with PCIe slots in it but would love to toy with a bunch of Parallella boards for a CPU-bound thing or two. So for me this is a more interesting option and I've backed their Kickstarter for that reason.
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In the low-end cpu market the i3-2100 has two cores, each does 49.6GFLOPS - outperforming the Parallella with 64 cores that can only muster 90. The 16 core chip does 26GFLOPS. trumped by an old i3-330 with two cores providing 17GFLOPS each.
I'll give it one thing though, it beats the pants off an Intel Atom. The D2700 only does 17GFLOPS.
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It always comes down to the application: the i7 and i3 you mention consume how many watts? ... Impossible if the "real-time image processing" mentioned above should be done on a mobile device (mobile robot/drone). The 64-core epiphany only consumes 2 watts (in words: TWO!)!
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b) its theoretical performance isn't much better than current mobile GPU's found in cellphones and tablets. I don't know how much power they consume but I can play angry birds and watch movies on my phone for hours with its 5w/hr battery (of which the LCD backlight consumes the most power)
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you need to fill the SIMD units to get theoretical performance on a i7 (or similar). with epiphany it may be easier to get close to the theoretical FLOPS
http://www.adapteva.com/white-papers/ten-myths-debunked-by-the-epiphany-iv-64-core-accelerator-chip/ [adapteva.com]
Also you save lots of power, because you dont have vast amounts of cache (though this may effect performance for some cases), and the architecture is much simpler, with only the instructions needed (not decades of x86 legacy). last time i was in an HPC machin
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By the way, this Epiphany processor doesn't do double precision floating point. It only has hardware to do single precision and is not IEEE754 compliant.
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Mobile devices are already available with GPU's up to 32GFLOPS. The new iPad is 32 and Intel's new Atom SoC is 34GFLOPS. I'm sure the Tegra 4 will be up around those figures when it comes out too. (those GFlops figures don't include the dual-core CPU's they sit next to and the PowerVR GPU is clocked slower than the Parallella)
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Mobile devices are already available with GPU's up to 32GFLOPS.
Maybe, but are they also accesible for the programmer? I was greatly disappointed when I learnt that the praised and "powerful" GPU of the Raspberry Pi is locked down by NDAs and NOT available for the programmer for OpenCL or GPGPU. I think the same is true for the PowerVR.
I have looked around quite a while and have not found a readily available board with a GPU that could be programmed (OpenCL) and is powerful enough for real-time image/vision processing. Not sure about the Tegra 4 .... ?
Re:Hmmm... (Score:4, Informative)
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raw GFLOPS is not everything. GPUs need very SIMD work to reach the theorical limits. for a lot of graphcis work thats fine. for some scientific work its good too. for other promblems, where the code has lots of branches in it, you end up with cores waiting for other cores to do different branches (look up wavefront for more info).
the $99 on the kickstart gets you a dual core arm A9, with a 16core epiphany processor (a dual core arm A9 devboard costs in the region of $100 normally). no one is saying that th
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Yes, that's true. But unfortunately i cannot plug your Radeon or GTX into my mobile robot or quadrocopter in order to give them machine vision or neural networks/machine learning "brains" (at least not with some serious improvements in battery technology!).
So, what are the alternatives to bring the current vision algorithms to mobile devices/robots? The Parallella is the only option I am aware of.
For these types of mobile applications, you should rather compare the Parallella with Raspberry Pi or Arduino. A
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Total on-chip, inter-core bandwidth is 64 GBytes/sec, with 8 GBytes/sec of off-chip bandwidth.
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The problem, AssMarlow, is that most people here at Slashdot have a serious cas of fellatio mouth.
Posted anonymously, too! Chickenshit!
Headline Should Be: An Open Bitcoin Architecture (Score:2, Interesting)
It is like saying a bong is going to be used for tobacco. It may be true for some but we all know how it will _really_ be used.
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1. mine bitcoins on you parallella ....
2. convert bitcoins to USD
3. travel back in time with USD
-1. use USD to fund the kickstater for parallella
. profit
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When they taped out first silicon last year there was talk of its potential as a game emulator for the PS2 on cell phones.
Kickstarter (Score:4, Informative)
I checked their front page and they have a kickstarter going to fund further development.
Might want to check it out and chip in if you're interested.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/adapteva/parallella-a-supercomputer-for-everyone [kickstarter.com]
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Re:Kickstarter (Score:4, Informative)
I really like the parallella project. Due to its low power consumption (2 watts for the 64-core version), it is the only option to bring significant processing power to mobile devices (e.g. mobile robots/quadrocopter/drones) and would be ideally suited to implement machine vision and neural network/machine learning algorithms for those mobile devices.
That said, their kickstarter initiative has some serious flaws:
1. They are only offering the 16-core version for a goal of $750k. The much more interesting 64-core version is available only if a whopping $3m goal is met. Way out of reach for such a specialized interest project. And everyone who reads information about the parallella reads about the "sexy" 64-core version everywhere but can only fund the "just nice" 16-core version. From the comments it is clear: everyone wants the 64-core version.
2. There is only one interesting pledge: $99 for the 16-core version. No addons. No extras etc.
3. The information from adapteva is lacking. Only today they made the documentation available. But still there are no demos and dozens of questions in the comments which are unaswered.
Compare this to a greatly successful campaign like for example the Digispark (a low cost "mini-arduino"): a lower easily reachable goal, lots and lots of extras and addons developed together and in response to the backers and a constant information and communication with the backers. I wanted to spend $20 on this project but finally spent $70 because of all the addons and how responsive the team was to the backers. Digispark achieved more than 6000% of its initial goal!
That said, what would I suggest for the Parallella kickstarter:
1. Go for the 64-core version. Bring the goal from $3m down to say $1.5m by dropping the 16-core version (should save almos $1m) and some bank loan (if you can present >1000 backers who pay >$1.5m that should be no problem. .. and so on ....
2. Offer more than just a 64-core parallella for $199. Offer special version for a higher price. Offer a dual-64-core version (with two epiphanies on it). Offer a "compute cluster": a little laser cut box with a network, a power supply and slots for up to 8 parallellas. Offer those cluster equipped with 1-8 parallellas. Offer a "machine vision" parallella with a camera sensor attached to it
3. Be more open and communicating with the community. Answer all questions in the comments. Put up some polls what backers want. Provide demos/tutorials etc.
Please don't take this personally. But i would really like to see this project succeed. .... and I want machine vision and a neural network brain for my quadrocopter (yep, world domination ... that's the plan!) ;)
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your wish on the clusters has been answered. http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/adapteva/parallella-a-supercomputer-for-everyone/posts/323994 [kickstarter.com]
i agree that the 64core versions is far more exciting than the 16core version. i guess maybe they think there is a lot higher risk there (they have already made and tested a small number of 16core chips, http://www.adapteva.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/adapteva_mpr.pdf [adapteva.com] )
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Yes yes yes ... looks great :) ...
The 64 cores version is still out of reach though :(
yeah whatever... (Score:2)
the real question is:
how many double sha256 hashes can they do?
FPGA (Score:4, Interesting)
To make parallel computing ubiquitous, developers need access to a platform that is affordable, open, and easy to use.
They promise the latter three, but "access" seems a bit lacking. Also they specifically left out performance but talk it up in separate marketing materials (5 watts for 45 GFLOPs etc)
Some other alternatives optimizing for local maxima in the solution set:
Just simulate in software, if you don't care about speed but want to learn to program parallel. Erlang? They seem to have a fixation on C, why not use the right tool?
Go to opencores.org and stick a zillion cores on a off the shelf FPGA dev board. Or a fat stack of picoblaze or microblaze if you're willing to deal with the annoying licensing hassles (my advice, stick with opencores to avoid legal hassles, the weird licensing for the *blaze family is like the creepy dude in a van offering kids "free" candy)
They seem spread a bit thin based on clicking around the website. They're doing everything but invent hard AI and the warp drive on their website, which is a lot for just 4 people. Their kickstarter seems pretty firmly grounded in comparison.
One of those "infinite spare time" play toys would be to stick a bunch of 6809 cores (or pdp-8s or -11s or Z80s or whatever) on one of my FPGA boards and figure out the glue logic. Anyone with a big enough board could download by VHDL/Verilog and go for it on their own hardware.
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Just simulate in software, if you don't care about speed but want to learn to program parallel.
I was thinking virtualization, how hard would it be to virtualize more cores than you physically have in the same VM? Just make say 16 virtual cores point to the same physical core as 16 different processes and you'll have a "64 core" machine on a quad core. Of course you'll get less total performance but you'll very quickly see if your application actually scales before you get a real massively parallel box.
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Also, the difficulty is not sticking a bunch of cores on an FPGA, the difficulty is to create an architecture where those cores can actually communicate in an efficient manner, both with each other and with off-chip memories.
Still very expensive for the performance (Score:5, Informative)
16TFLOPS for $3000 or 0.09TFLOPS for $200. I'll stick to current hardware thanks. 178x more processing power for 15x more money. I would also prefer a "super computer" can address more than 4GB of RAM with more than 64bits of memory bandwidth. The architecture also limits the core cache to 64k.
Re:Still very expensive for the performance (Score:5, Informative)
Even GPGPU is limited for what it can do for HPC. There's a lot more to HPC than raw mathematical power. Memory is often the bottleneck, not the FPUs. The reason we even deal with multiple processors is that the performance increase of single cores has nearly stalled, forcing the use of multiple processors. Communication between multiple cores/processors is a very complicated thing, as well, and getting good performance is a lot more complicated than hooking up a bunch of processors in a grid. For example, the supercomputer I work with has 90,112 2.3GHz cores and 90TB ram; 16 cores per chip in 704 blades, interconnected with a 3d torus network topology. It's the memory/cache size and speed and network topology that makes it a supercomputer. You could get the 800TFLOP/s in a much smaller package using GPUs, but the performance would be drastically less. Even with the 64 cores parallella could have, distributing the workload on a 64 core grid isn't easy. GPGPUs use work groups of smaller numbers of cores to make this sharing a bit more easy to manage. They should have at least made the interconnects a 2d torus rather than a grid, thereby reducing the maximum path length in half. In order to do stuff like quantum mechanics, a 5d torus is optimal. Memory access is the key. This is a bit like comparing apples to oranges, but that's exactly my point: the thing is not a supercomputer.
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Perhaps you shouldn't make the question "either / or". Having recently built a Top500 top 100 rank supercomputer, I can tell you that we would not have been able to do that for the budget we had without employing GPUs. Getting the same performance with CPUs only would have been impossible within the budget. GPUs are a tremendous bang-for-the-buck and do very well on the flops-per-watt metric also. (This is assuming that your applications can be modified to effectively use the GPUs. Not all problems are amen
Parallax Propeller (Score:5, Informative)
The Parallax Propeller is a great multi-core chip to get started with. The chip is $7.95 and has 8 cores running at 80Mhz. You can pickup the Quickstart board at Radio Shack for $40, including an overpriced RS USB cable (they normally retail for $25).
The Parallax Propeller is a much more economical way of getting started with multi-core programming. Parallax offers the PropTool, which provides SPIN and PASM language support. For C development you can get SimpleIDE which is a great IDE to get started with C programming on the Propeller, which uses a port of GCC.
SDK and Architecture Documentation Released (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/adapteva/parallella-a-supercomputer-for-everyone/posts/323691
They have released their SDK and architecture documentation, worth a read. ...
Looks like an interesting platform, but the current performance indeed make me feel lacklusting
Difficult times... (Score:1)
The multi- and many-core market is about to get crowded. After Tilera (www.tilera.com) there are now Kalray (www.kalray.eu) and the p2012 platform of ST microelectronics that produced silicon. And a lot of people working on research stuff, including open-source ones like soclib (www.soclib.fr). And it's not yet clear who's going to use all these architectures, even though logically this should be the way to go.
Sending messages (Score:1)
If you were to send messages from one Parallella to another Parallella, would they be called Parallellagrams?
How to characterize performance (Score:2)
How many of these would it take to, say, ray-trace Call of Duty: MW3 in real-time, 60 FPS? Would it cost less than using a modern graphics card to do the usual non-ray-traced rendering? That would be pretty cool.
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a LOT considering its 90 (was 100 few days ago) Gflops single precision. This is 1/10 of Radeon 7750
Green Arrays 144 computers on a chip @ 20 USD (Score:3)
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If you like Forth i suppose.
Thank goodness! (Score:2)
Cheap or High Performance, PickOne (Score:3, Insightful)
Adapteva is creating false expectations here. Their chip won't deliver performance on par with GPUs (or CPUs, for that matter) and still be cheap. Why? Because it's not a thing that a startup can to in todays world of computing. For such a chip you need to use the latest CMOS processes and a huge team to design/optimize the ASIC (especially if it's meant to be a low power chip) -- both of which are extremely costly. If it was that easy, then we'd see more competition and not Intel, AMD, Nvidia and IBM as the only global players in the HPC arena.
If you're a small startup, then you'll be bound to 100nm processes (at best), and have to use automated layouts (not the hand-optimized ones e.g. Intel uses). Both reduce performance, increase power intake.
I work at the Chair for Computer Architecture at FAU. We have some of very brightest minds working at custom chips for industry solutions. This 2D CPU matrix that Adapteva proposes is something that my colleagues have played with years ago. It's a good approach and I personally believe that this will be the shape of CPUs to come. It started with the ring bus on the IBM Cell, now Intel's Nehalem has got an partitioned L3 cache connected with a... ring bus and Intel's Xeon Phi (MIC) even got a 2D on-chip grid network. But even my colleagues concede that a) on FPGAs you'll always be trailing GPUs concerning floating point performance (it's something FPGAs are particularly bad at) and b) even when designing an ASIC you'll always be beat by GPUs in terms of performance, assuming similar prices and power consumption. Those are simply beasts, optimized down to the bone. It's the result of a multi-billion mass market. That's also the reason why there is no next IBM Cell chip for a PlayStation 4: Cell was too expensive to develop to keep up with the competition. Its market is too small compared to the ubiquitous GPUs.
For teaching parallel computing I'd always suggest a GPU. The tools are there, the performance is great and you'll be able to use the knowledge gained in real-world projects.
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>If you're a small startup, then you'll be bound to 100nm processes (at best), and have to use automated layouts (not the hand-optimized ones e.g. Intel uses). Both reduce performance, increase power intake.
they are planing to use "GlobalFoundries’ 28nm SLP technology" www.adapteva.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/adapteva_mpr.pdf
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100nm process? ... Well, if you had read the information provided you would know that the 16-core version from the kickstarter is done in a 65nm process and the 64-core version is done in the 28nm process in cooperation with Globalfoundries.
And for the GPUs: yes, i know that a modern GPU (or even a core i7) is more powerful. But, I unfortunately I cannot plug a modern GPU into my mobile robot/drone/quadrocopter in order to do things like real-time vision processing/neural networks/machine learning/AI. The e
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OK, maybe 100mn was a bit too much, yet I don't see the 28nm coming. Just to give you a comparison: Samsung is manufacturing the brand new Galaxy S3 SOC in 40nm. Why don't they use 28nm? Don't they want it? Hell yes, but it's not that easy. Think about that.
The power argument and the architecture's openness are sensible, I don't argue against that. Yet, the performance per Watt seems grossly inflated. If you look at today's most power efficient HPC chip, the CPU of IBM's Blue Gene/Q, then you'll see that th
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>Adapteva claims more than 9. So they're twice as good as IBM? Really?
Epiphany has a customised core that only has instructions useful for floating point,and fetching data. They have also changed from hierarchy of caches to a more network like method of moving data around. Its a scale of general purposeness, there things that a full CPU can do well that will choke an ephiphany. there are things an epiphany can do well that will choke a GPU.
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And for the GPUs: yes, I know that a modern GPU (or even a core i7) is more powerful. But, I unfortunately cannot plug a modern GPU into my mobile robot/drone/quadrocopter in order to do things like real-time vision processing/neural networks/machine learning/AI. The epiphany consumes something between 2-5 Watts (in words: TWO watts for 64-cores). I am currently not aware of anything coming close to the performance of the parallella for the mobile vision processing applications mentioned above.
If you have around $3-6M (USD) to spare, I could have a 25mm x 25mm chip fabricated, using 28nm CMOS technology at either TSMC or GlobalFoundaries, with a 2-core ARM Cortex-A9 and a custom 384-core MIMT architecture, the latter of which would hit above 500 GFLOPS in single-precision peak performance.
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If you have around $3-6M (USD) to spare, I could have a 25mm x 25mm chip fabricated, using 28nm CMOS technology at either TSMC or GlobalFoundaries, with a 2-core ARM Cortex-A9 and a custom 384-core MIMT architecture, the latter of which would hit above 500 GFLOPS in single-precision peak performance.
MIMT? Do you mean MIMD, or is this some new acronym I don't know about (and probably should)?
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MIMT (multiple instructions, multiple threads) is a term that I coined in one of my recent journal papers, which I just sent out for review, for a ray tracing architecture. While there were, arguably, better terms that I could have employed, e.g., coherent multi-threading, I preferred MIMT, since it immediately lets readers know that the work is different from the current SIMT (single instruction, multiple threads) paradigm in commodity graphics hardware.
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You're correct that it would be quite expensive, considering that just a 28nm mask alone runs around $2.8M to $3M (USD) these days. However, with around $6M (USD) in hand, I'd be able to get some investors on board to match or even triple that amount, which would give me a better amount of wiggle room.
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And what would you suggest if the application is highly memory-bandwidth bound and uses only simple integer arithmetic?
In that case, GPUs still won't cut it, because their memory bus easily gets congested.
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Is there an architecture with a memory bandwidth superior to GPUs? Nope. Commercial FPGA boards get in the range of O(20 GB/s), but defenitely not O(200 GB/s), which is where GPUs stand.
However, (Nviidia) GPUs are not designed for heavy integer arithmetic. FPGAs do this quite well and even though their DRAM controllers are generally worse, they can often avoid much memory traffic at all by keeping intermetiate data in their comparatively large on-chip SRAM. BTW: Xilinx have just recently announced their fir
Palindrome (Score:1)
Epiphany's Architecture (Score:3, Informative)
The Epiphany core has a mere 35 instructions – yup, that is RISC alright – and the current Epiphany-IV has a dual-issue core with 64 registers and delivers 50 gigaflops per watt. It has one arithmetic logic unit (ALU) and one floating point unit and a 32KB static RAM on the other side of those registers.
Each core also has a router that has four ports that can be extended out to a 64x64 array of cores for a total of 4,096 cores. The currently shipping Epiphany-III chip is implemented in 65 nanometer processors and sports 16 cores, and the Epiphany-IV is implemented in 28 nanometer processes and offers 64 cores.
The secret sauce in the Epiphany design is the memory architecture, which allows any core to access the SRAM of any other core on the die. This SRAM is mapped as a single address space across the cores, greatly simplifying memory management. Each core has a direct memory access (DMA) unit that can prefetch data from external flash memory.
The initial design didn't even have main memory or external peripherals, if you can believe it, and used an LVDS I/O port with 8GB/sec of bandwidth to move data on and off the chip from processors. The 32-bit address space is broken into 4,096 1MB chunks, one potentially for each core that could in theory be crammed onto a single die if process shrinking continues.
...but does it run linux? (no, really) (Score:2)
seriously, though, what does it run? the article doesn't say except to use the nebulous term "open source". or are they planning on schlepping off the initial software development to the open source community too? (good luck with that)
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seriously, though, what does it run? the article doesn't say except to use the nebulous term "open source". or are they planning on schlepping off the initial software development to the open source community too? (good luck with that)
Seriously, though, UN*X-like operating systems for massively parallel architectures have been written in the past - one I'm familiar with is Helios [transputer.net]. The Linux kernel is not optimised for massively parallel architectures, so that I doubt it would be easy to port Linux in such a way that it made efficient use of the parallelism of the Epiphany architecture. But the kernel is a relatively small part of a distribution. However, writing a new kernel is not an unfeasible task: Linus, after all, wrote the original
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all the compiler stuff is merged into GCC as of 4.7 http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.7/changes.html [gnu.org]
I like their approach (Score:1)
Some questions for those who may know... (Score:2)
OK, I'm giving up my power to moderate on this story to ask a few questions. Let's hope the answers are worth it...
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I'm assuming this thing is MIMD. Separate processors with separate memory seems to me to imply that. Am I right?
- Yes, you are correct. Epiphany is MIMD.
How does this design relate to the old Inmos Transputer [wikipedia.org], which, from what I recall, was conceptually fairly similar? Is it a development of the same ideas, or is it something completely different?
- Transputers are now fairly antiquated - they were 8-bit engines! However, the basic concepts are pretty similar. It's been a long time since I thought about Transputer implementation details, but the biggest, most obvious difference in my mind is the standard, open programming environment... Inmos was very pigheaded about only supporting OCCAM; the CTO was quoted saying "we'll supp
Tilera (Score:2)
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This doesn't count as Open and certainly not Free (Score:2)
The thing about CPUs that makes Adeptiva's statement not particularly impressive is that in almost all cases, the ISA of a CPU _must_ be published, otherwise you can't get developers to write code for it. But an ISA is just a language, not an implementation. A CPU that is not "open" by their definition is completely worthless.
GPUs are much worse because they've always been peripherals, hidden behind a driver, which is responsible for generating rendering commands from OpenGL and JIT-compiling virtual inst
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The ISA is in appendix A: http://www.adapteva.com/support/docs/e3-reference-manual/ [adapteva.com]
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I'm not sure if you're trying to correct me or not. I assumed that the ISA would be published, along with lots of architectural details. I'm just saying that they HAVE to be published or else the CPU is worthless, so by saying that they're published, Adeptiva isn't doing anything special.