Parallella Platform Now Available with 64 Cores

Today we are proud to announce that we have completed integrating the Epiphany-IV 64-core 28nm chip with the Parallella prototyping platform.  This is a major milestone as it demonstrates a practical path to delivering 64-core credit card sized boards later this spring.

The new Parallella prototyping FMC daughter card with Epiphany-IV chip on it  is shown in the picture below.  The Epiphany-III and Epiphany-IV chip packages were designed to be very similar and  “almost” pin compatible in order to maximize board and infrastructure reuse. Because of this important design choice, we are able to use the same FMC board for both 16-core and 64-core chips, with the only difference being the voltage regulator used to generate the Epiphany IO voltage supply rail. (Unlike the 16-core chip which operates with a IO voltage of 2.5V, the 64-core E64G401 IO needs a power supply of 1.8V.)

The following picture shows the 64-core Epiphany-IV based Parallella prototype platform. As you can see, it is almost identical to the 16-core platform, and  the only difference is the FMC daughter card being used. From a software development standpoint, there is no difference in developing code for the 16-core and 64-core platforms.

Here is the printout of the first program (matrix multiplication) running on the new 64-core platform.We are still working on optimizing the drivers and tools for the new 64-core platform, but we think this is a great start.

Next week we will be shipping 8 of these 64-core FMC cards to Parallella Kickstarter backers for use with their prototype systems. We look forward to seeing the exciting applications they come up with that fully leverage 64 CPUs running in parallel.