Recently, I’ve noticed a very interesting hardware project: Parallella, a low cost (99$ only!) pocket supercomputer packing a lots of computation power: it includes a Zynq chip (which contains a dual core ARM processor and an FPGA) and it also includes an Epiphany multicore chip.

It also features USB, Ethernet, HDMI and some GPIO pins, which make it like a kind of raspberry pi on steroids.

What’s very interesting at this platform, is the Epiphany multicore chip, which comes in two options: 16 cores or 64 cores. The 64 core version, which runs at 700 MHz has a theoretical computation power of 90 GFLOPS, yet it only consumes 5 W of power. It’s very interesting how this chip packs a lot of RISC cores without consuming a big amount of energy.

It looks like the future reserves us a proliferation of massively parallel architecture, which will brings us more and more computation power.

There is a Kicktarter fundraiser for Parallella here: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/adapteva/parallella-a-supercomputer-for-everyone