Adding OpenCV to the picture is an interesting possibility. I've experimented a bit with machine vision and LinuxCNC, and the 16 core Epiphany co-processor should do great on the machine vision algorithms. One ARM core for real-time, one ARM core for general non-realtime, 16 cores for vision, and hostmot2 in the FPGA would make quite a machine control package for $99 (all using about 5w of power).
-- Ralph ________________________________________ From: Charles Steinkuehler [[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, July 24, 2013 5:43 PM To: Enhanced Machine Controller (EMC) Subject: Re: [Emc-users] Parallela board On 7/24/2013 7:25 PM, Jack Coats wrote: > Just curious, how much does LinuxCNC benefit (or not) from multiple > processors or 'cores'? >From what I know (and I'm *NOT* a core developer) it helps quite a bit to have a "few" cores, but LinuxCNC doesn't really scale well to lots of cores. Basically if you can have a core to dedicate to real-time, or perhaps even one core per HAL thread (if you're running multiple thread timings), that would get you the best latency numbers. The cores running HAL threads would be idle most of the time, but that's the price you pay for having them dedicated and providing best-possible latency. Beyond a few cores, any benefit gained would be outside the realm of LinuxCNC (ie: the OS, X-Server, various other background tasks, etc), but it's not like LinuxCNC could suddenly run with 8x the HAL thread rate just because you have an 8-core i7. So for LinuxCNC 2+ cores is a lot better than one, but 64 cores isn't really a lot better than 2 to 4 cores. -- Charles Steinkuehler [email protected] ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ See everything from the browser to the database with AppDynamics Get end-to-end visibility with application monitoring from AppDynamics Isolate bottlenecks and diagnose root cause in seconds. Start your free trial of AppDynamics Pro today! http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=48808831&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
