by aolofsson » Thu Jun 08, 2017 3:13 am
...feel compelled to respond.
Here's my 2 cents on free will. I chose to destroy my body and mind for 9 years with relentless 80 hour work weeks in an attempt to bring financial security to my wife and kids and to show the world a more efficient way to compute. There was not a single day during that time that Adapteva wasn't on my mind. In late 2016 I decided that Adapteva was never going to break through to the main stream and that my impact on the world was going to be marginal at best (you will never know just how close we got....) so I chose to move to DARPA where I get a safe salary, a significant research budget and the ability to affect a whole industry. It wasn't an easy decision, but definitely the right one for me and my family.
So where does that leave the community? Well, it's your choice...but before you choose to abandon the Parallella consider this:
-What is the alternative?
-All of the software is open source so you are free to choose your path
-All the boards are open source so you are free to choose your path
-There are thousands of Parallella boards for sale at Digikey (not running out for many years to come...)
-There are 20,000 Epiphany-III devices on the shelf so if the E3 fits your needs and you are brave enough and have the $ you could build your your own boards
-The Epiphany(3,4,5) IP is (and always have been) available for licensing, so if you are brave enough and have the $, you can build your own chip.
What you are not going to see is any chip development from Adapteva in the near future.
The Parallella community was by far best result of the 9 year Adapteva journey and I will be forever grateful to folks like @tnt, @dar, @coduin, @ericsson, @polas, @dimako, @nickoppen and others for incredible efforts to build open source parallel programming tools, tutorials, and libraries. If only the world would have paid more attention!
I wish everyone best of luck on their chosen path!
Andreas