Comments on: $99 Raspberry Pi-sized ‘supercomputer’ touted in Kickstarter project

By: snake0

snake0 — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 01:41:02 +0000

You seemed to have missed the point of this project, which is to spur the paradigm of parallel computing. GPU Compute isn’t as scalaeble not as open as this project is. It’s about innovation, not ‘current’ max power.

By: John

John — Sun, 30 Sep 2012 16:31:18 +0000

Probably the difference, besides price, is that you can’t stack your laptops into one big machine easily, as you can with these things. I hope my understanding is correct.

By: Kire Alyad

Kire Alyad — Sun, 30 Sep 2012 15:37:03 +0000

The talk about supercomputer is nonsense and I’m not impressed with the numbers.

I have more gflops on my PC and if I wanna get cheap gflops I can for instance buy a GeForce GTX 560 for under $100 and get another 200 gflops. It will most likely take at least a year before they can ship and then we will have even faster chips…

Give me a 1 teraflop chip for under $100 within a year and I will sign up.

By: 320x200

320x200 — Sun, 30 Sep 2012 15:30:58 +0000

I dunno, it’s easy to pooh-pooh ideas, and maybe this has some sort of size advantage I’m just not paying attention to, but ANY modern GPU absolutely destroys this as far as compute power…

By: snake0

snake0 — Sat, 29 Sep 2012 05:00:17 +0000

Just my 2c but the limiting factor in such a robot would be sensor and motor quality, not the raw CPU power.

By: Steven Roth

Steven Roth — Sat, 29 Sep 2012 01:17:04 +0000

Please donate your computer’s power to scientific research at World Community Grid by IBM and email me if you want me to send you flyers to help promote it

By: Gustavo

Gustavo — Sat, 29 Sep 2012 00:42:47 +0000

The difference is that you didn’t pay $99 for your i7 computer :)

By: melajara

melajara — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 20:35:06 +0000

Besides, from this source:
http://vr-zone.com/articles/large-supercomputers-to-speed-up-100-pflops-in-2014-1-exaflop-by-2017-/16018.html

One can read that the upcoming Intel Haswell CPU
“will incorporate fused multiply add (FMA) instructions, allowing for up to 16 double precision on 32 single precision FP ops per core per cycle. On a, say, 10 core Haswell-EP Xeon (or similar Core iXX desktop variant) at 3.2 GHz, that would give you 500 GFLOPs in double precision, or whole round 1 TFLOPs in single precision FP peak performance. Haswell EP processors should be available by early 2014″.

By: melajara

melajara — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 19:28:02 +0000

I’m not impressed by the 90 gigaflops figure for the 64 cores version.

As I’m typing this on my notebook, from this page
http://www.ocaholic.ch/xoops/html/modules/smartsection/item.php?itemid=537&page=3
I see that I can tap from my CPU (Intel Core i7 3820) 91.87 gigaflops !

So no need for this $200 board, or am I missing something?

Anyway, for more power, I would prefer to invest in a CUDA based GPU (see http://developer.nvidia.com/cuda/cuda-gpus)

By: GatorALLin

GatorALLin — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 19:13:06 +0000

@Mario… Yes, to be clear Kickstarter is a pledge and NOT a guarantee… You can however tell a lot about a KS project by who is doing it, what experience they have on past accomplishments, etc. I have myself pledged or involved with over 80 Kickstarter projects and not been disappointed once…yet. I love that it gives an opportunity to make things happen that would have never been possible without prefunding… or the viral marketing that is often required for them to meet their financial goals. In a way their project is about ME…. without me it likely would have not happened… or sot it is fun to think so. Sure some of the projects would have been done anyhow… but some of them need the crowd sourcing to make them happen. Angle investor is a great term…. just multiply that by a thousand or more… Thanks for believing in that project… I hope to see your cool idea up on Kickstarter.com project… what if we all had an idea that would change the world…. Just saying…

http://www.kickstarter.com/profile/326187434

By: Marcos Marin

Marcos Marin — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 16:08:32 +0000

Not “in business” yet but now we are at least talking. I predict this will pass quickly through our commune’s senate, i.e. Kickstarter ;-)

By: Marcos Marin

Marcos Marin — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 16:07:04 +0000

Those ‘guarantees’ are made by the project owners, thus, by definition, under this assumption.

Welcome.

By: Editor

Editor — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 14:33:01 +0000

Hi, Mario, and welcome. Yes, mileage may vary…. Let us know how it works out?

By: Mario Calderon

Mario Calderon — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 14:30:58 +0000

I’m a long time lurker and a first time poster. Hi, all. :)
This is incredible news, but I do have one point of clarification:
By the nature of Kickstarter, a pledge does not “guarantee” anything. Anyone who pledges should think of themselves as angel investors; there’s always a chance with all Kickstarter projects that backers will get a big, fat empty set for their money. It seems unlikely, but there’s always the chance.
Having said that, I’ll be backing this project; thanks for bringing it to my attention!

By: tim the realist

tim the realist — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 14:27:39 +0000

with the advertized price and performance per watt many robotic applications come to mind. It’s all about the software :)

By: Gorden Russell

Gorden Russell — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 13:40:55 +0000

Say, Dan, would “13GHz and 26 gigaflops performance” be enough to control a robot that could do real work?

By: Dan

Dan — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 13:18:32 +0000

This is awesome, people might not realize how big a step forward this is by making this system open source but it is huge