Parallella Community

I was looking at the Parallella chip recently and was wondering if I could make it a gaming pc by adding a GPU to it. Can I do this? Is it possible to make a gaming pc with the Parallella chip?

Parallella is a computer and not a chip. But what sets it apart is that it has a multi-core Epiphany chip.

You cannot add a GPU to the Parallella computer in the same way that you could with a PC or similar. It would be possible to implement a GPU in its FPGA, but this would not compete with the GPU of a PC or even a smartphone etc.

Even with a GPU, you would still only be able to run Linux/ARM games (or possibly Windows Embedded games, if they exist).

Generally speaking the Parallella would not make a good gaming computer.

Regards,

Andrew

And also, can I use it to gain money in any way? Like by building a server from it?

There could be some interesting applications for the parallella in games, particularly servers. Minecraft comes to mind.

Please take a look at the memory requirements of current games, and how much of it is game state (which is relevant to servers). Then compare that to the memory available on the Epiphany chip: 16*32k = 512 KB of memory total. That's KILObytes.

You could of course ignore the Epiphany chip. Then you have a computer with 1 GB of memory and a relatively slow dual-core processor without any GPU inside. My seven-year old notebook has more performance (admittedly, at a higher wattage).

Thanks guys !

I think if you do stuff like moving water around with some fancy realistic algorithm and represent the data in a compact format, the epiphany will be useful for that. Thing is, you will have to usually build such applications into your game, because games are optimized for "normal" CPUs and GPUs and thus avoid doing things that would be efficient on the epiphany.