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My propeller is, for the first time, suffering from depression — Parallax Forums

My propeller is, for the first time, suffering from depression

DavidZemonDavidZemon Posts: 2,973
edited 2014-09-01 10:38 in Propeller 1
Very soon I will no longer be able to reliably say "my microcontroller has more cores than your desktop". This makes me and my Propeller very sad :(

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=19-117-404

Comments

  • Heater.Heater. Posts: 21,230
    edited 2014-08-29 21:08
    SwimDude,

    Your Propeller should have been on anti-depressants for years now. My tiny Parallella board has 16 cores for example.http://www.parallella.org/board/
  • DavidZemonDavidZemon Posts: 2,973
    edited 2014-08-29 21:22
    Ha! That looks like a ton of fun to play with! Wish I had a reason to buy one.
  • Heater.Heater. Posts: 21,230
    edited 2014-08-29 22:30
    Exactly. What would you do with it?

    I backed the Parallella on kickstarter because I thought it would be neat to help someone make such a chip. It's a nice ARM board anyway and it has that FPGA stuff thrown in as a bonus.

    Problem is to make good use of it you need a problem that requires a lot of floating point maths work. You need to be able to write that for parallel processors.
  • prof_brainoprof_braino Posts: 4,313
    edited 2014-08-30 07:52
    Heater. wrote: »
    Exactly. What would you do with it?

    I backed the Parallella on kickstarter because I thought it would be neat to help someone make such a chip. It's a nice ARM board anyway and it has that FPGA stuff thrown in as a bonus.

    Problem is to make good use of it you need a problem that requires a lot of floating point maths work. You need to be able to write that for parallel processors.

    By the time somebody figures that out, our parallella boards might be valuable antiques. In the mean time, it makes me happy that these at least exist.
  • David BetzDavid Betz Posts: 14,516
    edited 2014-08-30 14:10
    Heater. wrote: »
    Exactly. What would you do with it?

    I backed the Parallella on kickstarter because I thought it would be neat to help someone make such a chip. It's a nice ARM board anyway and it has that FPGA stuff thrown in as a bonus.

    Problem is to make good use of it you need a problem that requires a lot of floating point maths work. You need to be able to write that for parallel processors.
    Is the FPGA on the Parallella board big enough to fit a P1v COG?
  • Heater.Heater. Posts: 21,230
    edited 2014-08-30 17:24
    The Parallella board uses a Zynq-7010 Dual-core ARM A9 CPU and has 28K of logic cells with 240K(bits?) of block RAM, 80 DSP blocks,

    The DE0 Nano has 22,320 logic elements, 594Kbits embedded memory 66 multipliers.

    I have no idea how "logic cells" compare to "logic elements" but I might naively assume the whole P1 would fit in there.

    No wonder the Parallella CPU chip gets so damn hot.

    What you are suggesting is that the Parallella would almost fulfill my dream of many years ago for a Propeller/ARM combo. Not sure if this thought ever crossed my mind, I think I just assumed there was not hat much FPGA fabric in there. My dream did not include such a power hungry result.

    I guess we really do need a 20GFLOP coprocessor for our Propeller projects after all.

    Actually doing this is of course impossible.
  • pik33pik33 Posts: 2,366
    edited 2014-09-01 10:38
    Some GFlops are possible with the rest of (about 100k LEs) DE2-115 available after implementing P1V
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