Stefan Mileschin

A chipmaker is looking for finance for a new product which could mean that the great unwashed move to supercomputers.

Adapteva's normal business is making low-power RISC chips, which it sells to board manufacturers. CEO and founder Andreas Olofsson wants to use a Kickstarter project to raise at least $750,000 to push its supercomputer technology into the bigger world.

Adapteva has designed Parallella which it is pushing as a Supercomputer For Everyone.

Basically it is a 16-core board which can manage 13GHz and 26 gigaflops performance, costing $99 each.

The company wants to build a $199 64-core board hitting 45GHz and 90 gigaflops.

The project involves dual-core ARM A9-based system-on-chip, with the 16- and 64-core RISC chips acting as coprocessors to speed up tasks.

The company claims that the Adapteva architecture hits performance of 70 gigaflops per watt, and 25GHz per watt,.

According to the project's Kickstarter page if you pledge of $99 you will see a 16-core board by May 2013, while a pledge of $499 guarantees delivery by February.

Parallella gear will be fully functioning computers. They will have an Ubuntu 11.10 port to ARM, with 1GB RAM, two USB 2.0 ports, 16GB of MicroSD storage, HDMI, and Gigabit Ethernet.

It is a similar concept to the Raspberry Pi but it will have 10 to 50 times the performance.

http://news.techeye.net/chips/chip-m...r-for-everyone