Parallella design files shipped to manufacturer!

It took much longer than expected, but the first revision of the Parallella board has been sent off to the manufacturer and we will have the first 10 Parallella boards built up and ready for testing by April 15th!

At this point, I feel like we owe everyone an explanation why we are running late. The main reason is that we underestimated the challenges involved in reaching the $99 price point when we launched the Parallella project back in September. Producing a $99 single board computer may not be that difficult if you are shipping millions of units (you can buy a $50 Android smartphone today), but with only 6,300 Parallella boards shipping, it was a whole other story…

We spent close to two months optimizing the design for cost (ie reducing component counts and scouring the data-books for inexpensive high quality alternatives) in order to get within striking distance of the $99 price target.  Unfortunately there wasn’t much that could be done about the complexity of the board layout due to the abundance of high speed differential routing, 0.8mm pitch BGAs, and tight component placement. The Parallella is now a 12 layer board with aggressive line and drill hole dimensions.

The schedule slippage is VERY painful for all of us but in terms of product features the Parallella project is coming together even better than we could have hoped.  The thought of having actual Parallella boards in hand in a  few weeks is very exciting!

21 Comments

  • Theo Verelst says:

    > “…The thought of having actual Parallella boards in hand in a few weeks is very exciting!”

    It sure is !

  • Gbenga Adigun says:

    This will be exciting! Can’t wait to get one

  • Antti says:

    What PLL chip is used?

  • Adam says:

    Congratulations Andreas, and the rest of the team..

    Did you actually manage to keep the assembled board cost under $99? and did you only build 6,300, or are there extra being built for post-kickstarter fulfilment sales? (I assume with the Z7010)

  • Roberto says:

    Excited to know!

  • Heiko says:

    I am quite shure that the manufactorers know that this is only the start of a success story about making a super-computer available to almost everybody. If all the interested people (like me) would have gotten the information of your kickstarter-project earlier, the amount of first-production-boards would have been much bigger. Now i am awaiting the next production-circle to receive the 90 GFLOP – chipcard-supercomputer soon.

  • Columbia says:

    When is the parallel board available for the rest of the world? 🙂

  • James says:

    Does the Parallella board also include the host board with the arm a9 processor? …because the host board is big!!

  • Nike says:

    When is the parallella board available for the rest of the world? any timeline?

  • It’s hard to commit on final costs without building a few hundred boards at least, but we are close to $99. Once we have delivered the 6,3000 Kickstarter boards we will build up many more.

  • Follow @adapteva on twitter and sign up for an email notification on this site. As soon as we are ready to take more orders you will hear about it.

  • Yes, of course. The final credit card Parallella board shown in the picture in this post includes a host processor (the big square in the middle of the picture) with a dual core ARM A9 processor. The slightly smaller square to the right of the “big square” in the picture is our Epiphany multicore coprocessor.

  • Well done Andreas and the team. You are breaking new ground, making parallel computing a possibility for many, which in my opinion means it takes as long as it takes. I look forward to not only this first release (I’m a Kickstarter backer), but being able to buy future editions as you progress along the roadmap.

  • Andrew Back says:

    We’re currently unable to provide a date for post-Kickstarter orders, but you can be certain that it really is a case of as soon as possible!

  • Earl Cameron says:

    why not integrate the arm core into the parallela chip, difficulty of design or the expense of licensing?

  • Andrew Back says:

    I can’t speak on behalf of Adapteva, but I’d suggest that integrating ARM and Epiphany (and perhaps a bunch of peripherals if you’re going to do this) is the job of a SoC vendor. Sure, you could do everything yourself, but that would take more resources, more money and, I’d guess, more time.

  • Jan Rychter says:

    The moment I saw your target price point I said to myself “they can’t possibly make it work!”. I am very surprised you went with a ZYNQ, which is a very expensive chip. I’d go with a Freescale i.MX (more peripherals, cheaper), but I guess you had your reasons.

    I’m glad the vendors were flexible on the pricing, but I’m worried how this will translate into volume production later.

  • Ali says:

    What is the HDMI chip used?

    Can we see an EXACT BOM?

  • Andrew Back says:

    The BOM, schematics and hardware reference manual will be published soon.

    Regards,

    Andrew

  • Lorena says:

    If I were a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, now I’d say “Kbnoauwga, dude!”

Leave a Reply