Ten things you should know about Parallella
#10. Best Price Performance
There are cheaper single board computers out there, but starting at $99 the Parallella board is still the leader in terms of price/performance. 18 CPU cores, Gigabit Ethernet, 1GB RAM, and a Field Programmable Gate Array for $99 is a great deal!
#9. Made in the USA
The Parallella board was designed and manufactured locally here in New England (USA). If you live outside the USA this probably doesn’t matter to you but keeping a local manufacturing ecosystem alive is an important thing. If you support US manufacturing, you should consider buying the Parallella, one of the few US manufactured computers. It wasn’t easy to produce a $99 computer in the US, but we did it!
#8. Massive IO
The Parallella has over 40 Gbps of IO bandwidth. That’s roughly equivalent to FOUR-HUNDRED Raspberry Pi 10/100 interfaces.
#7. Small Size
The Parallella is very small (credit card sized just like the Raspberry Pi and Beaglebone). Size does matter and the smaller you make it the better.
#6. Field Programmable Hardware
Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) is a big part of the present and future of computing but is rarely found in inexpensive single board computers. FPGAs give anyone with courage the power to design custom hardware. It’s not as hard as you think! All you really need is an understanding of boolean logic and an intro to Verilog/VHDL and you are up and running. The Parallella board includes a large FPGA that lets you create pretty much any interface for the GPIO pins. Think about how many different interfaces are out there in the world and how powerful a feature this is for your embedded design and prototype!
#5. Open Documentation
Fully documented and openly available datasheets, schematics, board specifications.
#4. Open Source Freedom
The Parallella is a true open source hardware and software platform. Gerbers, CAD files, BOMs, schematics, drivers are all available in our github repository. If you don’t like our pricing or design choices, you are always FREE to modify it and design your own board. Not everyone cares about freedom, but if you do, you should buy open source hardware.
#3. Community
Parallella has an first rate community with over 200 Universities, dozens of research labs, some of the biggest communication companies in the world and some of the best hardware/software hackers around. The Parallella forum is a community of true professionals and the list community contributed open source Parallella project examples is expanding.
#2. General Availability
Parallella has top tier distribution through Amazon, Digi-Key, RS Components and boards have now been in stock continuously since August 2014. The Parallella is not an eval kit or a short life span consumer device. The Parallella board, manufacturing flow, and logistics has been built for the long haul and we plan to produce and sell the Parallella for many years to come.
#1. The Future of Computing is Parallel
If the next generation of programmers (kids today) aren’t completely fluent in parallel programming, then something has gone terribly wrong. Kids should be writing parallel programs from day one and there isn’t a better platform to get started with. The Parallella is the BBC Micro / Commodore 64 / Amiga / Apple-II of the 21st century and is the only accessible computing platform available that gives a heading towards the future of computing.
