Well, this post has perfect timing for my ends. :-)
<a href="http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sby/sys/4567451353.html" rel="nofollow">http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sby/sys/4567451353.html</a><p>I backed the original Kickstarter, have a bunch of Parallellas, and due to a cash crunch have to liquidate a bunch of them. Above is the link to my Craigslist ad.<p>These have equivalent specs to what Adapteva is calling the "embedded" version, but they come with the older, smaller heat sink and thus will still need an external fan.<p>Note that I'm both selling below Adapteva's list price and that the version I'm selling is marked "out of stock" on Adapteva's site. :-)
The fact that price goes down as the application goes from server to desktop to embedded is very telling, in several ways.<p>One way is the commoditization of computing: actual computer power is now a commodity, with very low prices and standardized interfaces. Ethernet is the new pallet, and servers are trucks.<p>On the other extreme, the embedded landscape demands catering for each application, demanding a lot of GPIOs, specific hardware and hand work. It gets expensive.<p>Of course, the Parallella just shows this in such a nice way because it evens the (massive) computing power in all offerings, that differ only in interface. Actual consumer products will try to balance this, but it still tells us a history.
I wonder how long it's going to take until someone is going to port OpenCL natively to Fortran. Lots of Fortran programmers in HPC and they currently can only use NVIDIA GPUs and Intel MIC. ARM platforms could be interesting in the long run. I hope either AMD or Cray take the plunge. If that happens, I'd be happy to integrate Parallela with my parallel computing preprocessor framework[1].<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/muellermichel/Hybrid-Fortran" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/muellermichel/Hybrid-Fortran</a>
So glad these folks haven't died. If I can get one it will be a nice complement to the Zedboard.<p>Still need to get the bugs worked out of my Xilinx on Ubuntu setup though. Annoys me to have to run Windows in a VM to use the toolchain.