Under my umbrella

If it rhymes with a Rihanna tune from like 200 years ago, it must be good.

Some time ago Parallella got their funding goal on kickstarter and that is just great news for all us FOSS people. Adaptiva is producing a open source 16 risc core computer for 99 dollars! It runs Ubuntu! Go and get one!

Parallella runs on a a9 cortex arm core with an epiphany chip for paraller processing. Unlike the current raspberryPI's and Arduinos, parallella is fully open source and that means people can actually develop display drivers and mpeg-accelerators for it. I've followed the haiku-version of raspPi quite closely and discovered how much trouble there is with the really cool and interesting things that rely on broadcom chips that have closed source drivers on linux. What this means is that all the promising cheap hardware is at the mercy of chip manufacturers to write drivers. And when such a driver is written, it's a binary blob that runs on Linux and does only the things broadcom want them to do. Thats a great loss for all the other open source os's which are not based on 1970's ideology for os design.

The parallella board reminds me of the late Atari Falcon in the way that Falcon had a DSP chip when no other piece of hardware had it. If you look at the falcon demos on youtube, you'll see they cranked out quite impressive stuff from the machine way back in 1993 where you had to hand code dsp-assembly to do basically anything.

The falcon however came in too late, the 16-bit era was dawning and people were buying big metal boxes that could churn out ega-graphics and make irritating sounds with the inbuilt beeper. At the time I gave up personal computing altogether and discovered that trying to master James Jamersons grooves on a Peavey bass was much more inspiring than staring at lego-brick graphics on a computer that cost 3 times as much as the more advanced Atari falcon. The whole thing didn't make any sense to me anymore.

So here we are at the end of 2012 and parallella is on it's way. I'd very much like to see the epiphany chip being put on a good use on open source os's. Offloading mpeg encryption/decryption to epiphany would mean we no longer have to care about broadcom specs anymore. You could do some pretty wicked real time audio / video mixing with it. Even write your universal openGL implementation to run on epiphany instead of relying on software renderers that run on arm or whatnot. Sure, it would't be the latest nvidia X but accelerated 3d on your favourite os, hey,what's not to love?

The board is here soon, please take a look and code the most mindblowing plasma or liquid projection screensaver with it. Or mine bitcoins or something. I think Adaptiva would be happy to have their chip to receive a proper trashing from us programmers. Yip!