by e97 » Fri Jul 28, 2017 1:33 am
I backed Parallella on Kickstarter. Super impressed that it shipped and works!
Sad to here that Andreas has moved on but it is understandable. Starting a company is hard. Building and shipping products is hard.
I don't think Parallella is dead. It needs a killer app to showcase its power and usefulness.
As a software guy learning about hardware, the board has all the bells and whistles: ARM SoC, FPGA, and Epiphany-III and there are tutorials out there: doing FFT building a cluster .. but I have yet to see an "HOLY SHIT" moment where I've seen someone do something amazing.
I've since bought a separate FPGA development kit because it has lots of materials and mini projects which help me learn how to build and create for an FPGA. Same with RaspberryPi and why its such a big success - lots of show and tell, community and documentation.
If someone showed me Tensorflow or some AI library running on Parallella at a better Compute / Power than GPUs or something - it would be an overnight success.
I will continue to tinker with it and learn and I'm currently deciding whether to keep or sell my Kickstarter edition A101040, if anyone is interested shoot me a PM.
edit: Right now the killer app is *coin mining .. if you could create something that was plug and play and you could efficiently mine *coin (BTC, Litecoin, Etherum) that would be the HOLY SHIT moment as of right now (2017-07-25)