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by bhickey 4986 days ago
Hasn't Amazon already done this with EC2?

(Edit: Written in response to the title.)

2 comments

Huh? How does this have anything to do with EC2?

Parallella is an dual core ARM board with an FPGA and a 16 core Epiphany CPU (full general purpose CPU cores with 32k static RAM built into each core - all the cores can access the memory of all other cores as well as system RAM). 1GB RAM total. Expected size around a credit card or so.

The main purpose is the Epiphany CPU, which they also have a 64 core version of. Their problem is that their current CPU's are produced using a process that gives them very low yields and very high per-CPU cost. The main goal of the bounty is to enable them to switch to a much higher yield process and bring the per-chip cost of the 16 core version down to a few dollars per chip.

Their long term roadmap is boards with 1000+ cores.

Yeah, the cloud is much more accessible "for everyone" than this chip. If you want to learn parallel programming rent a GPU instance.
A GPU has a totally different architecture and programming model. It is interesting for very different types of uses.
Who rents GPUs?