Parallella: The $99 Linux supercomputer

[Gulliver]

Speaking of intended audience, did the Raspberry Pi even reach it's intended audience of British teenagers wanting to learn programming?

I have a couple of close friends living in Britain, and they say it has become the must have geek toy, and very popular, but unfortunately despite the heavy promotion in the education sector, it hadnt caused a major impact the way they intended with teenagers learning programming.
Maybe it is because teenagers nowadays have so many other things to get distracted with. Things that werent present when we grew up (Internet and hardcore gaming).

[agami]

Yes, exactly. It is geared towards a completely different audience, at more than double the price point, yet somehow the RPi should get ready to "move over" for it?

Wow, talk about judging a book by its cover. You take one statement made in a summary line and pass judgement on the writer, the actual article, and ZDnet as a whole.

And for the rest of you ingnorami out there, it's called flair. The writer and we (most of us) are not laconic fact producing and consuming robots. It's perfectly reasonable to entice your audience with these types of sub-titles.

And 'move over' doesn't mean 'pick out your coffin'. Where RPi was the only game in town in this space now there will be another.

Also, when you take all the facts about the RPi and Parallella you'll find they have a lot of things in common; small size, low price, board only, ARM based, runs Linux, etc. It may not aim for the same audience but it will attract a lot of the same audience.

Man, wandering through the Amiga desert has certainly taken its toll on some of you.

[commodorejohn]

If that line wasn't representative of the article's tone, they shouldn't have used it as a clearly-marked summary of the article. As for ZDnet as a whole, I've seen quite enough of their other output in recent years to feel comfortable making that generalization.

And the RPi hasn't been "the only game in town in this space" pretty much since the RPi came out, just the one with the lowest price; there've been an assload of cheap small ARM boards at similar price points to the Parallella, so I don't know why the journalist thinks that the Parallella is in any particular competition with the RPi specifically.

[MicroStrand]

And the RPi hasn't been "the only game in town in this space" pretty much since the RPi came out, just the one with the lowest price; there've been an assload of cheap small ARM boards at similar price points to the Parallella, so I don't know why the journalist thinks that the Parallella is in any particular competition with the RPi specifically.

You're damn right, there are enough boards with a lot more learning potential, like for example the BeagleBoard xM, PandaBoard ES, or the SBC2100 by IC Nexus. They have not only more interfaces, but provide much more flexibility for software solutions. Sheer computing power is just not all.

[cunnpole]

You take one statement made in a summary line and pass judgement on the writer, the actual article, and ZDnet as a whole

I think you'll find there were several factual inaccuracies in that short story and perhaps stupidly I expect people in his position to put a bit of effort into understanding what they are talking about. That wasn't flair, it was incompetence. Have a look at his previous stories for more of the same.

[vidarh]

Yep, even for that market there are far too many existing motherboards with 16+ onboard Cuda or openCL cores, never mind those of us with dedicated cards. I'd much rather pick up the new 16 core pure arm chips if SoC floats your boat

GPU cores are not general purpose. Completely different type of beast. And this is the *first* step in scaling this up, to let people get familiar with the programming model. Their roadmap is for hundreds of cores per chip based on *current* manufacturing methods.

I'm looking greatly forward to mine to play with...

And it's worth pointing out for those going on about the price that this is a dual core Zynq SOC (ARM + FPGA in one package) + the Epihany chips. Most Zynq dev boards are priced higher than what you get the full package for from Parallela.

If you want an rPi, then you should get an rPi. They're not competing for the same things at all.