Parallella $99 board now open hardware on Github

Morgaine Dinova wrote:

 

Of course, Epiphany cores being programmable in C/C++ is the key feature that will make all the difference in practice.

Maybe, but one thing that's become clear from the RPi phenomena is that the majority of people just want a cheap media player and don't care what else it might be capable of.

For the 16 or 64 cores to get used they need some practical purpose that's generally useful to more than a demo or niche application. Otherwise, just on the Arm cores alone, how does it compare to one of those A20 OLinuxino's ?

On ARM performance:

selsinork wrote:

 

Otherwise, just on the Arm cores alone, how does it compare to one of those A20 OLinuxino's ?

Probably not quite as good, since the OLinuXino's A20 runs at 1GHz instead of the 800MHz of the Parallella's Zynq, and the A20 features the more modern Cortex-A7 MPcore whereas Zynq 7010/7020 uses the older Cortex-A9 MPcore.  Both are dual core, but the A20 OLinuXino can be expected to have the edge on pure ARM SoC performance.  Of course, the Parallella would trounce OLinuXino totally if the Epiphany can be brought into play as an accelerator, but that's a hope rather than an actuality.

Also, the A20 OLinuXino will provide SATA which Parallella lacks, whereas Parallella provides gigabit Ethernet which the currently specified A20 OLinuXino boards lack despite the A20 having gigabit capability.  That suggests that the A20 OLinuXino may be more generally useful, whereas the Parallella may be better for some kinds of fast Internet server that don't require high bandwidth to storage.  The 10X gigabit advantage of Parallella can of course make a colossal difference under high network load.

Price-wise, the A20 OLinuXino comes in at 55 euro ($71.51) and 65 euro with 4GB onboard Flash ($84.69), versus $99 for 16-core Parallella and $199 for 64-core Parallella, so OLinuXino wins that one easily.  Parallella does have an onboard boot Flash, but it's a tiny 128MB one.

So, swings and roundabouts, and horses for courses.

On applications:

the majority of people just want a cheap media player and don't care what else it might be capable of.  For the 16 or 64 cores to get used they need some practical purpose that's generally useful to more than a demo or niche application.

Adapteva are working on the Pi principle of "give people a cheap board and they'll find the applications".  That's reasonable in itself, but $99 is not cheap, and $199 for the 64-core version even less so.  The "Pi effect" won't kick in at that price, because that kind of money does not fall under the radar for the general population, particularly younger people.  They'll sell a good number (the 6,300 Kickstarter backers make a good start), but my theory is that the sale/price curve is extremely non-linear and only has a huge peak near the origin, then falls off very sharply.  Even the £35 Pi sold above its normal expectations I think because of the unconscious effect of the "$25 computer" advertising which was literally incorrect and partially deceptive for around a year before the Model A appeared.

One application area for Parallella that is mentioned regularly is Software Defined Radio.  It appears that this holds huge interest and has a ready clientelle among the many radio amateurs around the world, quite possibly resulting in thousands of sales all by itself (a bit like XBMC in the case of Pi).  Whether Parallella is useful as a media centre remains to be seen, but that application doesn't justify a $99 expenditure when $35 can do it.

Morgaine.

Although Adapteva are still fulfilling their Kickstarter committment, their shop is already open for preorders of the 16-core Epiphany board for November delivery.  Three options appear to be available:

If "No GPIO" means none, zero, zilch, that doesn't appear very enticing, I must say.  If this describes the situation accurately, the range of application of the basic board will be a lot narrower than expected.  And if the Zynq-7020-based Parallella-16 costs $199, then the price of the Parallella-64 is probably going to be very unfriendly.

Does anyone have a ballpark price for the Xilinx XC7Z010 or XC7Z020-1CLG400C?

I ask because if the price difference between the Zynq 7010 and 7020 versions of Parallella-16 is $80, then it's highly likely that the cost of the 7010 is a large part of the BOM cost of the entire board.

Combining the gigabit Ethernet which is not a low-cost option with the (probable) high price of the 7010 device, this suggests that the Epiphany-16 chip itself is not very expensive because somehow it all has to add up to $99.  Since the board is open hardware, this in turn suggests that far cheaper Epiphany-powered boards could be created by open hardware enthusiasts by replacing the extortionate Xilinx hardware with something else.

If as seems likely, the Epiphany-16 really is inexpensive, 4 of them on a board fronted by a cheap TI or Allwinner ARM SoC and interfaced through low-end programmable logic sounds a lot more appealing than multiple hundreds of dollars for a Parallella-64 which isn't yet in development anyway.

Morgaine Dinova wrote:

 

Does anyone have a ballpark price for the Xilinx XC7Z010 or XC7Z020-1CLG400C?

 

I ask because if the price difference between the Zynq 7010 and 7020 versions of Parallella-16 is $80, then it's highly likely that the cost of the 7010 is a large part of the BOM cost of the entire board.

At Avnet.com, which is where I usually price Xilinx, the XC7Z010-1CLG400C is US$53, quantity 100.  The XC7Z020-1CLG400C is US$108.  So it's about US$55 difference.  Remember that the 7020 Parallella includes the GPIO connectors.

The Parallella pricing is for "preorder", so may go up in November.  The original Xilinx marketing materials for Zynq talked about US$15 chips, but that's probably a target, with absurd quantities.

I'm sure Adapteva will happily sell Epiphany chips to whoever wants to buy them.

John Beetem wrote:

 

At Avnet.com, which is where I usually price Xilinx, the XC7Z010-1CLG400C is US$53, quantity 100.  The XC7Z020-1CLG400C is US$108.  So it's about US$55 difference.

Very interesting!

It was only a rather unsafe inference that the 7010 was a large part of the cost, but it seems that I guessed right, or at least not entirely wrong.  It seems then that the Epiphany-16 costs comparatively little, and most of the $99 price of Parallella is going to feed poor starving Xilinx.

Since it's open hardware, alternative designs without the Xilinx tax beckon.

If the board maker is paying an extra $55 for the chip then an end user price add on of $80 is perfectly reasonable (even rather low)  - just look at how much the big players charge for an extra few G bytes of flash in a phone or pad.

The price of the Zynqs may fall when they have any competition - the MicroSemi (aka Actel) SamrtFusion2 parts look interesting - CortexM3 and FPGA on a chip with lower prices than Zynq (for less performance of course, but  a much simpler part to work with). If the catalogue price for the XC7010 is $53 for 100 it may well be down to $15 for 100k already. FPGA pricing is always difficult to estimate because all the manufacturers like to keep the real prices for volume between them and the actual customer.

MK

Morgaine Dinova wrote:

 

If "No GPIO" means none, zero, zilch, that doesn't appear very enticing, I must say.  If this describes the situation accurately, the range of application of the basic board will be a lot narrower than expected.  And if the Zynq-7020-based Parallella-16 costs $199, then the price of the Parallella-64 is probably going to be very unfriendly.

Given there's an 'optional upgrade' for the GPIO connectors it seems likely that the difference is simply down to installing the connectors.  Any volunteers to hand solder four of those ?

In some ways you can see the reasoning, not having them will not prevent you doing software things on the Epiphany processor.  If you really want gpio, and don't care so much about the Epiphany there are probably better boards.

Am I correct in thinking that the only difference between the 7010 and 7020 is more FPGA space ?  If so, what's this board really meant to be, a dev board for parallel processing on the Epiphany, or an FPGA dev board ?

Michael Kellett wrote:

 

If the board maker is paying an extra $55 for the chip then an end user price add on of $80 is perfectly reasonable (even rather low)  - just look at how much the big players charge for an extra few G bytes of flash in a phone or pad.

That's true for a normal consumer end product designed to make profit.  However, Parallella is not that.  It is a board designed with a very different purpose in mind, to raise the worldwide profile of Adapteva and their Epiphany concept of simple processor arrays, and to work out in the community all the software problems of working with it.  The Adapteva CEO has said very clearly that a 5-man company cannot possibly achieve this on its own.

The board is very unlikely to be generating significant profit for Adapteva, or any at all --- a  rough estimate of the cost of the primary BOM components shows that quite clearly now that we have a ballpark figure for the Xilinx devices.  That extremely low or zero profit margin is a direct result of using inappropriately expensive host-side components around the Epiphany.  The Xilinx tail is wagging the Epiphany dog on costs.

The engineers at Adapteva should have recognized that their primary purpose is to promote Epiphany, not the Zynq range.  The main cost component on the Parallella board should therefore have been their own device, and not Xilinx's.  It's extremely likely that the choice of Zynq will be limiting the uptake of Epiphany through excessive costs.  We live in the age of the Pi price niche, so we know how this works now.

In addition, it should be noted that Adapteva's main software goal is (or should be) to gain experience with and generate tools for Epiphany-side computation, and not to solve nor optimize performance for one very specific ARM + FPGA architecture.  I suspect that not only have they made a wrong choice based on costs, but are also going to end up spending time on the wrong problem as a consequence.

selsinork wrote:

 

what's this board really meant to be, a dev board for parallel processing on the Epiphany, or an FPGA dev board ?

If Adapteva had asked themselves that question very clearly and seriously, I suspect that Parallella would have a very different design and a very different cost.  As it stands, the main effect of the board will be to promote the Zynq range to a far greater number of people than Xilinx would normally expect, but to a far smaller number of people than Adapteva would like as an audience for Epiphany.

It's a design from heaven ... for Xilinx.