Get a 16-core Parallella supercomputer for £60

Computer processing is about to hit a wall. We’ve seen dual and quad-core mobiles but they’re not enough to breach that procesing-power-to-juice-consumtion barrier. Adapteva, the folks behind the Parallella supercomputer project, says more cores while using an open source hardware platform is the key to a faster future.

Thanks to Kickstarter, the Parallella pocket-sized PC will grant you, for US$100 (£60), a 16-core Ephiany-III processor that runs in parallel with an ARM A9 dual-core CPU and 1GB RAM. Adapteva claims that means 10-50 times more performance than Raspberry Pi and when hitting its 32 GFLOPS top end it’ll only need 2W of juice.

The soon-to-be credit card-sized computer will also come with two USB 2.0 slots, MicroSD, Ethernet, and an HDMI port. It’ll run on Ubuntu OS and be completely open source with all dev tools available online – ideal for all those budding parallel programmers out there.

The next goal is to create a 64-core version which will deliver 90 GFLOPS of performance comparable to a 45GHz CPU on a board the size of a credit card. And the best part is it’ll only consume 5W of power under typical workloads – plus it’ll be cheap.

The company’s founder, who’s been in the chip game for years, says it all rather well too in his video below.

[via Gizmag]

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Dan Grabham Editor-in-Chief

About

Dan is Editor-in-chief of Stuff, working across the magazine and the Stuff.tv website.  Our Editor-in-Chief is a regular at tech shows such as CES in Las Vegas, IFA in Berlin and Mobile World Congress in Barcelona as well as at other launches and events. He has been a CES Innovation Awards judge. Dan is completely platform agnostic and very at home using and writing about Windows, macOS, Android and iOS/iPadOS plus lots and lots of gadgets including audio and smart home gear, laptops and smartphones. He's also been interviewed and quoted in a wide variety of places including The Sun, BBC World Service, BBC News Online, BBC Radio 5Live, BBC Radio 4, Sky News Radio and BBC Local Radio.

Areas of expertise

Computing, mobile, audio, smart home