Get a 16-core Parallella supercomputer for £60

Computer processing is about to hit a wall. We’ve seen dual and quad-core mobiles but they’re not enough to breach that procesing-power-to-juice-consumtion barrier. Adapteva, the folks behind the Parallella supercomputer project, says more cores while using an open source hardware platform is the key to a faster future.

Thanks to Kickstarter, the Parallella pocket-sized PC will grant you, for US$100 (£60), a 16-core Ephiany-III processor that runs in parallel with an ARM A9 dual-core CPU and 1GB RAM. Adapteva claims that means 10-50 times more performance than Raspberry Pi and when hitting its 32 GFLOPS top end it’ll only need 2W of juice.

The soon-to-be credit card-sized computer will also come with two USB 2.0 slots, MicroSD, Ethernet, and an HDMI port. It’ll run on Ubuntu OS and be completely open source with all dev tools available online – ideal for all those budding parallel programmers out there.

The next goal is to create a 64-core version which will deliver 90 GFLOPS of performance comparable to a 45GHz CPU on a board the size of a credit card. And the best part is it’ll only consume 5W of power under typical workloads – plus it’ll be cheap.

The company’s founder, who’s been in the chip game for years, says it all rather well too in his video below.

[via Gizmag]

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