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Comment by jsolson | Hacker News Reader

I have one of those, although I bought it for the Zynq FPGA SoC.

I tried to find a use for the Epiphany cores, but the speeds and feeds were too unbalanced for anything I was looking at at the time.

The way that particular story played out suggests that I wasn't alone.

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This is probably not the place to write a full post-mortem, I will save that for a blog post or something, but here are a few points:

* 2008 was a really bad time to launch a chip startup

* Epiphany predated RISC-V...nobody wants a new ISA

* With <$7M raised in 9 years it was starved, there was no way to turn architeture into a good market fit (this would have required $50-$100M in tapeouts, CPU licensing, IO licensing, sw,sw,sw,,,). This is the problem we are trying to address now.

Epiphany did find some customer end applications (machine vision for example) and the Parallella board shipped in volume. The volumes and number of customers just wasn't big enough. Everybody wants to be the next ARM, Nvidia, but there is only room for 1-2 on earth.

As one of the early Epiphany owners, thanks for keeping things exciting.

Thank you!

Any more info on that?

what even was the intended usecase? What are the Epiphany cores for?

I guess a few people got the board to do something useful, but the vast majority of Parallella boards are sitting in a box in the bottom of a closet somewhere.

That is where mine sits. It was such an intriguing board at the time, but ended up becoming more of a collector’s item than anything.

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