A Busy Week for Announcements!

64-core Epiphany FMC

FMC daughter card complete with an Epiphany IV 64-core chip

In a post on Adepteva’s website on Tuesday Roman announced that they had completed integration of the Epiphany IV 64-core chip with the Parallella prototyping platform. Explaining how 16 and 64-core packages had been designed to be virtually pin-compatible, allowing the same PCB to be used with only minor changes to provide the 1.8v, rather 2.5v, supply required by the 64-core chip.

Eight of these boards will be going out to lucky backers in the coming week!

64-core Epiphany FMC underside

Spot the hardware patch with a 1.8v regulator on the FMC underside.

Epiphany in next generation SoCs

While not directly related to the Parallella project, there was an announcement on Tuesday from Global Foundries, that they will be offering the Epiphany IV microarchitecture to their customers for use in adding many-core technology to SoC designs. This is fantastic news as it provides further validation of Epiphany and is also a sign of things to come.

Epiphany + Go = ego

On Wednesday community member, mortdeus, announced that he was working on an Epiphany port of the Go compiler, providing a link to a repository on GitHub. We’re very much looking forward to following progress on this!

GNU Radio on many-core

Software-defined radio (SDR) is an application that frequently comes up and in a blog post on Thursday Tom Rondeau, GNU Radio project maintainer, explained how he had just pushed an update to their development repository that adds support for setting the affinity of a signal processing block to a particular core. Citing this as potentially being crucial to GNU Radio working well on many-core platforms such as Parallella.

We’re extremely excited at the possibilities presented by the combination of Parallella and GNU Radio, and delighted that work is being done which will improve GNU Radio’s many-core support.

New leads

David Richie will be well known to many in the HPC and OpenCL communities, and is Founder and President of Brown Deer Technology, the company behind COPRTHR SDK, the fully open source OpenCL implementation with Epiphany support. David has kindly agreed to take on the role of lead for OpenCL, is now moderator of the forum and will be sharing his thoughts here.

Our second new lead is Alan Wood, a long time open source hardware advocate with experience in concurrent systems, who has taken on the lead for Parallella daughter card design. Alan has a particular interest in modular open source hardware ecosystems and will also be sharing his thoughts here in the coming weeks.

It’s great to have you on board, David and Alan!

Leave a Reply