When comparing HummingBoard Gate vs The Parallella Board, 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 HummingBoard Gate is ranked 23rd. 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
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Pros
Pro Same software runs on single to quad CPU without any problems
Since the HummingBoard Gate comes with different versions, including different CPU versions, it can also run the same software without any problem on any CPU regardless of the number of cores.
Pro Some models fit inside a Raspberry Pi case
HummingBoard-Pro and HummingBoard-Base fit inside a Raspberry Pi model B case (but be aware that many cases will block the IR).
Pro Extremely extendable
Hummingboard Gate has a native mikroBUS system which lets users attach any “click board” that’s compatible with MikroElektronika’s system. This way the board can be extended by adding motion sensors, wifi cards, physical buttons, temperature sensors, NFC or Bluetooth and much more.
Pro Can be used as a media streaming device
HummingBoard works really well with Kodi and can be turned into a media streaming device with ease.
Pro Selection of great operating systems
Hummingboard supports OpenELEC 5.0, GeexBox XBMC, Android and Debian officially, but it can also run ArchLinux, openSUSE and Fedora successfully.
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.
Cons
Con Pretty expensive
Starting at $70, prices can go up to $235 depending on the model and the components that users choose to add to the board. For these prices it's rather expensive relative to other single board computers.
Con No built-in Wifi for the cheapest version
The cheapest version of the Humingboard Gate doesn't have a built-in Wifi card. You can either buy it separately as an add-on or you can buy a more expensive version of the Humingboard Gate which has a built-in Wifi card.
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.