#adapteva

#adapteva #Parallella machine. Have new cluster enclosure in the post, so will be running four boards soon. Each board has 18 cores, so great for distributed/parallel processing research. (at Hockessin, Delaware)

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A supercomputer for everyone. Basically, an energy-efficient computer built for processing complex software simultaneously and effectively. Real-time object tracking, holographic heads-up display, speech recognition will become even stronger and smarter with Parallella.

#SuryaRay #Surya While Kickstarter has changed its rules to make it clearer that the site isn’t just a store for hardware products, many companies that make actual products are still listing there. But two projects, one making motherboards and one a new type of chip, are struggling, leading me to wonder if Kickstarter is even the right place for geeky hardware plays. Almost two weeks in, Adapteva, which is trying to bring an alternative chip architecture to the masses, is only a third of the way toward its funding goal. Xi3, a rethink of computer motherboard and chassis design, has raised only $27,468 of $250,000 with 18 days also left to go. Meanwhile, projects associated with the Internet of Things have topped their goals and other toy tech-related projects are also doing well. Kickstarter can help niche hardware succeed While this could easily turn into a piece wondering what type of hardware plays well with the Kickstarter crowd, I’m wondering how really geeky projects such as Adapteva’s 16 and 64-core supercomputer systems on a chip or even a slightly more consumer-friendly modular computer from Xi3 should use the platform. Perhaps Kickstarter CEO Perry Chen can share more on this when he speaks at our RoadMap conference on Nov. 5 in San Francisco. The Adapteva Epiphany 16-core chip. One could argue that both Adapteva and Xi3 are examples of Kickstarter fueling a niche market the big guys won’t touch, as a blog post by Robert Fabricant of Frog Design suggests, or that it is a last-ditch effort to succeed. Fabricant wrote in his post “Kickstarter Rescues Startups That VCs Won’t Touch, But Here’s What’s Missing:” Product design is governed by the laws of supply and demand. There is a tremendous supply of talent, yet very few products actually make it to market. So most designers have a huge stockpile of high-fidelity concepts and beautiful renderings gathering dust. While a number of these concepts turn up on Core77 and Co.Design, they have zero paths to market. Now you can argue that we don’t need another slab phone/pad with a slightly different chamfer or bezel. But there are a whole host of neglected device categories desperate for attention, like watches, bathroom scales, and thermostats. These devices feel woefully out of sync in an iProduct world. Perhaps the biggest service that Kickstarter has done is to reinvigorate these categories to the point where bigger players might see their potential and escape from “Slab Land.” These projects fit in with Fabricant’s theme of Kickstarter being a good home for niche products that big vendors don’t want to touch or innovate, or even new chip architectures. Because of the large economies of scale required to get and keep the cost low enough, the computing world leaves a lot of room for smaller projects. The big challenge for the Xi3 guys and even Adapteva will be whether they can match their Kickstarter price to the market demand in a way that allows them to survive and innovate. Forget funding, Kickstarter as a marketing platform Namely, can Kickstarter generate the margins needed for a full-on production manufacturing schedule at smaller scale, or the margins to continue R&D for a chip? Does it have to? In the case of Xi3, the answer is a decided “No” David Politis, VP of marketing for the Salt Lake City-based Xi3, explains that the company decided to do a Kickstarter because it found the idea of crowdfunding so interesting, and it had a product to launch. While Xi3′s Kickstarter project hasn’t been much of success from a fund-raising perspective, the company says it has gotten marketing benefits from the campaign. ”As campaigns go it has been successful,” said Politis. He says that people who have visited the project page and viewed the video are already ordering the computer from Xi3 rather than waiting for the project to close. “You have to ask at what point does a Kickstarter project become a media channel?” he said. Xi3 has plans that go beyond its modular computer. Adapteva and its Parallella project is in a different boat. It has turned to Kickstarter to build a market for its product after it couldn’t find continued venture-capital backing. It’s done well so far, but on Tuesday it also released its reference manuals, something CEO Andreas Olafsson said he wouldn’t do unless the project was successful. When asked if this was done to help generate more interest, a spokeswoman for Adapteva dodged the questions and said it was just something the company decided to do now.   http://dlvr.it/2HsQXy @suryaray

#SuryaRay #Surya Andreas Olofsson, the founder and CEO of Adapteva, had a problem. He had built a computer chip that could deliver the horsepower of a supercomputer on a smartphone or a tablet. His Epiphany chip design was manufactured and then placed on circuit boards used by the military, but at $10,000 for a board, most businesses and the consumer electronics market wouldn’t touch them. Given how anxious people are about the battery life on their mobile phones and how much more computing these devices are handling, one would think venture capital firms would rush to back Adapteva, which launched in May 2011. But Olofsson couldn’t find investors. He blames it on the reluctance of venture firms to back chip startups — and they certainly are leery of investing in capital-intensive hardware startups– but it could have been any number of reasons: bad business plan, a realization that handset makers weren’t going to swap out a Qualcomm application processor for an untried Adapteva option, or something else. But instead of packing it in, Olofsson has turned to Kickstarter to bring his vision of supercomputer power in a tiny, low-power package to the market. He wants to sell a processor on a stripped-down board in two sizes as well as open source the software that will be needed to operate and program the chip. Called the Parallella project, the plan is to offer the 16-core board to those who pay $99 with the goal of raising $750,000. If the team can reach a stretch goal of $3 million it will also offer the 64-core version of its chip for $199. Olofsson says he was inspired by the market and hobbyist community that’s building around Arduino boards and the Raspberry Pi, a low-power and low-cost computer. Earlier this month researchers at the University of Southampton made a supercomputer using LEGO bricks and Raspberry Pi modules. Olofsson acknowlegeded that project but pointed out that the Adapteva chip could deliver a lot more power — the 64-core version of his board delivers 51 gigahertz (compared to the 1.4 gigahertz processor inside the Samsung Galaxy 3) while consuming only five watts (that’s still a lot for a phone). The Parallella boards will cost more however. Arduino boards or Raspberry Pi computers cost roughly $35 each as opposed to $99. But Oloffson is undaunted. He says researchers are already playing around with Adapteva chips for supercomputing and other projects, and aims to build a community. Kickstarter’s recent changes on how hardware companies will list their hardware caused minor launch snags for the Adapteva team, but nothing major. In fact, the Kickstarter changes, which were designed to emphasize the funding nature of the platform instead of having people who backed products thinking of it more like a store, fit with Olofsson’s ideals. For him, bringing massively parallel computing to phones and other devices is a mission, not just a business. “I feel like we have a better mousetrap here and yet the adoption has been very slow,” said Olofsson. ” And so we want to speed that up. As for the building a community, that’s our goal. We are talking a pretty scary step in opening our architecture. If this works we’re open sourcing and open licensing all of our SDKs. That’s the point of no return.” Indeed. After raising a Series A of financing and taking on a convertible note to get to this point, Olaffson is betting his hopes on the Kickstarter community. There will be no Series B for Adapteva. In exchange for the community support, he’s stripped down his board and is opening up parts of his business that would be impossible for another chip company, where IP is everything. Make no mistake, this is a Hail Mary pass for his company, but it’s not one other chip startups could necessarily follow. If Olofsson succeeds it may seem to be a new way of backing capital-intensive hardware firms, but in reality Adapteva spent $500,000 even getting the first version of its chips made. The military and its Series A strategic investor bore that cost, but declined to support the move beyond the $10,000 boards that are currently all Adapteva has to get people to embrace its new design. Let’s see if the Kickstarter community decides to give Adapteva and massively multicore parallel computing a whirl. http://dlvr.it/2DbDjT @suryaray