Custom PC, Issue 111

Custom PC Issue 111This month’s Custom PC sees an interesting diversion from the norm in my Mobile Tech Watch column, as I talk to Andreas Olofsson of Adapteva about his company’s Epiphany architecture and the Parallella project.

If you’ve not come across the concept, Parallella is Adapteva’s attempt to push its innovative many-core co-processor design into the mainstream. Raising money through Kickstarter, the company hopes to produce a credit-card sized development board with a dual-core Cortex-A9 chip alongside a 16-core Epiphany-III co-processor. Should things go well, the company additionally aims to release a more powerful $199 model with a 64-core Epiphany-IV chip.

Andreas is a great guy, whom I’ve interviewed before on many-core computing topics. He’s open about the inspiration for the project – the Raspberry Pi, naturally – and what his company hopes to achieve, and appears to have a realistic attitude towards the issues that stand between Adapteva and mass-market success.

Since writing the piece, the Parallella project has proved popular on Kickstarter, standing at $387,873 pledged of a $750,000 goal. With only nine days to go, however, Adapteva may struggle to hit its target – and, thanks to the all-or-nothing nature of Kickstarter funding, if it misses the target it goes home with nothing.

This piece is to be followed with another interview with Andreas in the next Linux User & Developer magazine, looking further into the open source nature of the Parallella project and the impact the Epiphany co-processor could have on the FOSS community – so if this article interested you, pick up a copy of that too for another look at the project.

Custom PC Issue 111 is available in all good newsagents, plenty of bad ones, the better dentists’ waiting rooms and digitally via Zinio.

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