[Beowulf] Parallella funding goals were met

[Tim Mattox]

Vincent,
Each of the 16 processors on the chip has a single precision floating
point unit,
which includes multiplication.  What it doesn't have is 64-bit floating point.
And they already have samples at 28nm, so get off your high horse and admit
that you got this wrong.  It is a cool project and I look forward to
seeing these
boards next year.

See page 36 of the epiphany_arch_reference_3.12.10.03.pdf found here:
http://www.adapteva.com/support/docs/e3-reference-manual/

Quoted here:
"
7.1.4 Floating-Point Unit
The floating-point unit (FPU) complies with the single precision
floating point IEEE754
standard, executes one floating-point instruction per clock cycle,
supports round-to-nearest even
and round-to-zero rounding modes, and supports floating-point
exception handling. The
operations performed are: addition, subtraction, fused multiply-add,
fused multiply-subtract,
fixed-to-float conversion, absolute, float-to-fixed conversion.
Operands are read from the 64-entry register file and are written back
to the register file at the
end of the operation. No restrictions are placed on register usage.
Regular floating-point
operations such as floating-point multiply/add read two 32-bit
registers and produce a 32-bit
result. A fused multiply-add instruction takes three input operands
and produces a single
accumulated result. A large number of floating-point signal-processing
algorithms use the
multiply-accumulate operations, and for these applications the fused
operations has the potential
of reducing the number clock cycles significantly.
"

On Sat, Oct 27, 2012 at 6:02 AM, Vincent Diepeveen <diep at xs4all.nl> wrote:
> Not gonna be easy for him.
>
> Last time i checked producing a low volume low power chip in a couple
> of thousands
> it was $50 a chip.
>
> He'll have to deliver now a few thousands of ARM socs with such a co
> processor for $99 a person
> around may 2013, and the co processor must have at least 16 processors.
>
> Then there is shipment costs and the ARM SOC costs.
>
> Now in Europe there would be VAT on top of the total amount as well,
> making it tougher
> to get the total costs at $99. In most nations VAT is just above 21%
> going up to 25% in Eastern Europe.
>
> So there is going to be very little, if any, profit on this.
>
> At most a few dollars.
>
> All this for a co processor that's supposed to not have a
> multiplication unit - so it can't comply to OpenCL.
>
> On Oct 27, 2012, at 10:48 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote:
>
>>
>> Thanks to everybody who contributed!
>>
>> http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/adapteva/parallella-a-
>> supercomputer-for-everyone
>>
>> 4,295
>> Backers
>> $782,862
>> pledged of $750,000 goal
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-- 
Tim Mattox, Ph.D. - tmattox at gmail.com