Dear backers,

I am extremely happy to announce that the 64-core Parallella board is alive and well!! The 64-core and 16-core Parallella computers share the same PCB design and on paper “it should have been” a very simple bringup process. The picture you see above is a 64-core Parallella board with a socket soldered onto the board to allow for in-place testing of the 64-core Epiphany-IV chips. We powered up the board last Thursday and by Friday evening we had a program running through to completion on the Epiphany, blinking an LED for good measure. Getting the elink read path flushed out took a little longer, but by Wednesday this week we had the whole board up and running perfectly. Having debugged 4 different Epiphany chips and 6 different Epiphany based boards to date, there is definitely a familiar pattern emerging:-)

Chip/board arrives

Nothings works–>panic

First “doh” moment–>signs of life, relief

Everything seems to work–>euphoria

A weird behavior manifests itself–>depression

Subtle “doh” moment and fix–>calm

We will start building and shipping the 64-core boards next week!

Despite all the delays and challenges along the way, the 64-core Parallella is still setting the standard in terms of energy efficiency. In fact, it could be argued that it’s the most efficient computer in the world today! Amazing to think that none of this would have happened if YOU hadn’t taken a chance on us back in 2012!

At one point during the Kickstarter campaign, life was a nightmare…now it feels more like a dream.

On the 16-core production front, we have now shipped up to backer #2,999 and all the remaining boards have made it through assemly. We expect to get ALL of the Kickstarter boards to our shipping partner by the end of next week.

If you received your board already, PLEASE do power up your board and tell us about your experience. The Parallella project long term survival hinges on the strength of the community and we need a steady stream of feedback to make the platform better.

Sincerely,

Andreas