[HH] Adapteva's Epiphany

[Tom Metro]

> Adapteva has created the world's most energy efficient multi-core
> architecture, bringing the future of computing to market today.

Anyone know what the price is on this? (The link for more info on
evaluation boards didn't include that info.) I guess maybe that's up in
the air because they intend to license the IP rather than produce the
chips themselves for production. Still, they must have an idea what the
production chips will cost, and thus what a production board will cost.

How interesting this is depends a lot on the price.

Some specs include:
 - 16 RISC cores
 - Up to 1 GHz performance
 - IEEE floating point
 - 8 GB/sec per core network bandwidth
 - 32 GB/sec per core memory bandwidth
 - 2 Watt max chip power consumption

Can they really shuffle around 8 Giga*bytes* of data times 16 cores for
only 2 watts? That's impressive.

It's not so clear to me what the compelling applications are for this.
The manufacturer has some suggestions:
http://adapteva.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=71:generalapps&catid=34&Itemid=73

Which include smartphones and tablets. Seems a bit overkill for those,
given that the software hasn't yet caught up to really taking advantage
of 4-core CPUs.

At "only" 1 GHz per CPU I don't think "supercomputer" is a compelling
option.

The strength seems to be in applications that need lots of parallel
signal processing, like VoIP, video surveillance motion detection
software video compression, etc.

If they were cheap enough, and you could couple them to enough RAM, they
could make for a decent micro server to house a bunch of Linux virtual
appliances.

 -Tom