A new $100 computer module aims to foster a wealth of compute-intensive applications for medical, automotive, and industrial control, machine vision and other applications. Built around the Epiphany low-power multicore SoC and the Zynq programmable SoC from Xilinx, the Parallella computer boasts supercomputer performance in a credit-card footprint.

 

The Epiphany architecture consists of a scalable array of simple RISC processors programmable in C/C++ interconnected by a fast on-chip network within a single shared memory. The Epiphany-III device has an array of 16 processors, while the Epiphany-IV has an array of 64 processors.

 

Everything on the Epiphany is designed for optimum performance with minimum power consumption. For example, when operating at peak performance the Epiphany-IV will provide 100 Gflops of raw computing power while consuming only 2 W. At 50 Gflops/watt, this makes the Epiphany-IV 50 to 100 times as efficient as any alternative.