The fact that price goes down as the application goes
from server to desktop to embedded is very telling, in
several ways.
The fact that you've fallen for a very simple marketing trick? The name "server", "desktop", and "embedded" are marketing terms. They're all the same CPU. The main difference is the number of GPIO pins between the board numbers.
Basic marketing trick. Always name your products as "good, better, and best" in some form. Unfortunately, it feels slimy to me, and I don't like it.
That said, I do like the idea of the Epiphany chip they're offering. But based on cost and performance alone, its clear that a $120 AMD R7 260x graphics card will be superior to what they offer here. (With its 14 compute units at 1.1 GHz, can do 896 SIMD integer or single-precision floating point operations per clock). R7 260x also has Windows / Linux drivers and OpenCL support included...
Epiphany is doing a disservice to themselves if they are trying to compete against "desktop" and "server" computers. Their niche is in their performance / watt. GPUs, with their 5GHz+ GDDR5 RAM, ~GHz clock speed, and super-parallel architectures will continue to dominate supercomputing at the ~100W to ~500W levels.
Epiphany IV is a supercomputer design at ~2W. Anything more is settled by the current laptop market. (AMD Kabini hits 150 GFLOPs at ~25W for only ~$60 CPU on a $30 motherboard)
I agree... its not "only" a marketing trick. The Epiphany IV looks like a unique computer architecture that I'd be excited to play around with (if I ever got the time...).
But I think its a bit of a stretch to call their "Desktop" offering suitable for "A Personal Computer", especially when the Zynq Z7020 is the core CPU of it. The performance offered is solidly in the "embedded" realm, and barely will be more powerful than your cell phone. (1GB of RAM is weaker than most people's cell phones...)
Basic marketing trick. Always name your products as "good, better, and best" in some form. Unfortunately, it feels slimy to me, and I don't like it.
That said, I do like the idea of the Epiphany chip they're offering. But based on cost and performance alone, its clear that a $120 AMD R7 260x graphics card will be superior to what they offer here. (With its 14 compute units at 1.1 GHz, can do 896 SIMD integer or single-precision floating point operations per clock). R7 260x also has Windows / Linux drivers and OpenCL support included...
Epiphany is doing a disservice to themselves if they are trying to compete against "desktop" and "server" computers. Their niche is in their performance / watt. GPUs, with their 5GHz+ GDDR5 RAM, ~GHz clock speed, and super-parallel architectures will continue to dominate supercomputing at the ~100W to ~500W levels.
Epiphany IV is a supercomputer design at ~2W. Anything more is settled by the current laptop market. (AMD Kabini hits 150 GFLOPs at ~25W for only ~$60 CPU on a $30 motherboard)