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Add to SafariWhen comparing The Parallella Board vs Intel NUC Kit NUC7i3BNH, the Slant community recommends The Parallella Board for most people. In the question“What are the best single-board computers?” The Parallella Board is ranked 18th while Intel NUC Kit NUC7i3BNH is ranked 27th. The most important reason people chose The Parallella Board is:
The Parallella Board makes use of the Epiphany III coprocessor which is invisible to the OS unless directly addressed through its APIs. It currently boasts 32 gigaflops from its 16-core variant with a promise of 100 gigaflops for a 64-core model which will be available in the future.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Amazing performance because of the Epiphany coprocessor
The Parallella Board makes use of the Epiphany III coprocessor which is invisible to the OS unless directly addressed through its APIs. It currently boasts 32 gigaflops from its 16-core variant with a promise of 100 gigaflops for a 64-core model which will be available in the future.
Pro Low cost Xilinx Zynq FPGA development
Although not a beefy FPGA, the price is right
Pro Excellent many-core RISC architecture
High performance, energy-efficient floating point capable, general purpose RISC cores
Pro Great board for programmers to experiment on different platforms
The Parallella is a great board for programmers to experiment programmin on ARM, FPGA and the Epiphany architecture in one compact package.
Pro Completely open source
Parallella uses open source hardware. The drivers are released as open source as well. All the details about the board designs and schematics can be found on GitHub.
Pro Ships with open source development tools geared towards Epiphany development
Parallella ships with several open source tools geared towards developing for the Epiphany architecture. Some of these tools include a C compiler, Eclipse, OpenCL SDK/compiler and runtime libraries.
Pro Comes with appropriate case and mounting hardware for storage drives
While the cost may seem steep compared to other SBC options, seldom are those other options sold with a case that will also house your storage drives and provide adequate cooling for the entire setup.
Pro SATA III port and M.2 NVMe connector with on-board RAID-0/RAID-1 controller
The ability to harness the power of a standard 2.5" SATA III drive and an M.2 NVMe drive with four PCI Express 3.0 lanes means that sequential read rates in excess of 3GB/sec if both are SSDs. Add to that hardware RAID support and it's hard to imagine a more powerful digital storage platform anywhere near this size.
Cons
Con Not great for media streaming
The Parallella board was built to give everyone access to a mini-supercomputer. It's strength lies in the Epiphany which makes it great for parallel computing and image processing, unfortunately it's not good with media (audio and video) streaming.
Con Requires dedicated software development
Since it uses a different architecture than most boards, out-of-the-box software is not compatible with it. Instead, there's a huge GitHub repository with official ports of popular software compatible with the Parallella Board.
Con Higher initial costs than most other options
It's clearly not a budget option for building a home NAS, but if you want performance and more importantly, scalability, then you'll reap the benefits of the extra upfront costs many times over as you upgrade the memory, add peripherals via USB-C and put that 7th Generation Core i3 processor to work.
