On Mon, Apr 28, 2014 at 9:20 AM, AJ ONeal <coola...@gmail.com> wrote:
> It's designed for people who want to experiment with parallel processing. > > However, I don't think it requires quite as much effort as you make it out > to be. It's not like the time before the RPi and BeagleBoard when if you > needed an SBC for business use you were stuck with the burden of purchasing > one from some company with an index.txt as their website, but they knew > you'd buy it even without documentation because you had no other option. > > There's an SDK and docs and a community around it. > > https://github.com/adapteva > http://www.parallella.org/quick-start/ > http://forums.parallella.org/ You can experiment with parallel processing on your PC. You can do it with much more interesting hardware on an old PS3 that still supports installing alternate OSes. The difficulty I'm talking with is *not* with obtaining the hardware. That was never very hard, though it used to be a lot more expensive than it is now. The difficulty and effort is that of getting something interesting and motivating as a hobbyist out of a bare C compiler and the basic libraries to communicate between processors. The Arduino was successful because it had a whole bunch of libraries to do interesting things, and a custom easy scripting language to extend it. The RPi was successful because it had a ready-to-run Linux distribution and drivers for the video hardware so you could plug it in and be playing your MP4 videos without tons of effort, and take advantage of pretty much any already-written Linux software. The advantages that the Parallella hardware has over Arduino and RPi (FPGA fabric and parallel co-processor thing) require specialized skills and/or tools to use. Undoubtedly there will be a few hard-core hobbyists that do cool things with it, but the vast majority of hobbyists who could do something interesting with an RPi will not be able to take advantage of anything but the ARM cores. I've been programming embedded systems based around SoMs and SoCs professionally for a long time now, and I've been following the hobbyist developments closely, so my analysis of the matter is not entirely uninformed. I hope you find a good home for your board and recover some of your investment in it, but I just wanted to ensure that anyone considering it was clear on exactly what it was. For the right kind of hobbyist, it would be an excellent board, but I think those are a relatively rare breed. --Levi /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
