Epiphany probably would make a pretty decent GPU. I've had a look over their spec. In many ways, their cores are a pretty standard in-order RISC pipeline, with some allowance for out-of-order completion. There's nothing terribly surprising in their ISA or implementation. What this means for us is that they're CPUs, designed for low latency good single-thread performance, not GPU cores, which are designed for high throughput and very high latency. For a graphics workload, these processors would not perform remotely as well per watt and per unit area as a GPU. But there are enough cores that it would outperform some low-end GPUs like PowerVR by a fairly wide margin, making it adequate for an open source graphics system.
Here's what I would want to see on a board that uses Epiphany for graphics: - One Epiphany chip - PCIe connection to host - Lots of RAM - An FPGA that can tie into the memory system for raster-scanning video - Video transmitters like DACs and DVI The first three are likely taken care of in any of their boards, so we need to find a way to get video on there. On Sun, Oct 28, 2012 at 6:22 PM, Hugh Fisher <[email protected]> wrote: > > Saw on Ars Technica an article about a Kickstarter project to build a cheap > massively parallel computing board. They are making all the right noises > about open access and source. It's going to be based around an 'Epiphany' 16 > or 64 core RISC chip. > > http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/adapteva/parallella-a-supercomputer-for-everyone > > From my quick skim of the project doco, I'd say the Epiphany CPU would make > a pretty good GPU. > > -- > Hugh Fisher > CECS, ANU > _______________________________________________ > Open-graphics mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics > List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com) -- Timothy Normand Miller, PhD http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/~millerti Open Graphics Project _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
