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Add to SafariWhen comparing The Parallella Board vs NanoPi M4, 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 16th while NanoPi M4 is ranked 51st. 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 6 core HexaCore, compact nvme extender, 4GB RAM
Pro Open Source
Works with mainline Linux kernel and open source Mesa Panfrost drivers.
Pro Many ports
4 x USB3
2 x USB2 available via pins
PCI-E available via pins
Pro Fast
Rockchip 3399 with two fast A72 cores. Good heatsink limites throttling.
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 Bleeding edge...
To have mainline kernel requires a bit of tinkering (e.g. installing Armbian). Panfrost drivers for 3d acceleration are not mature and crash sometimes...
