DIY YouTuber Builds His Own 256-Core RISC-V Megacluster at 14.7 GHz 1-Core Freq | Hacker News Reader

DIY YouTuber Builds His Own 256-Core RISC-V Megacluster at 14.7 GHz 1-Core Freq

wccftech.com

58 pointsteleforce21 comments

As one might suspect, "14.7 GHz" is roughly what you get by adding up the individual clock speeds. The overall tone of the video is a little goofy and this was obviously not meant by the creator as a serious performance claim.

That being said, it's still a cool project and I'd recommend just watching the video rather than reading third-party articles. It's only about 10 minutes long.

> was obviously not meant by the creator as a serious performance claim.

Clock speed is not performance much like voltage is not power.

Also check out your local parking garage, where on a typical day you'll find over 9000mph of single-car speed!

Le sigh.... dude mounted a bunch of underpowered CH32V203 microcontrollers on a bunch of simple boards and connected them by GPIOs. It is not a cluster in any traditional sense, and it is not 14.7 GHz.

Whoever wrote the wccftech article has both never heard of Amdahl's law AND was too busy making clickbait titles to view the original video...

What's "underpowered" about it? 32 bit processor running at 144 MHz (so 144 MIPS, less branch or memory stalls). That's similar to a Pentium 100 or PPC 601/100. And it's using 20 mW, vs about 10 W for those, so a factor of 500 better in energy use.

Certainly faster CPUs exist, but you don't always need faster, and for what it does it is pretty efficient -- and for a suitably embarrassingly parallel task 256 of them are still low power (about 5W).

underpowered compared to what is meant by "cluster" or "GHz"

Saving web searches: 144 MIPS x 256 processors = 36864 raw MIPS, or about twice as fast as an Xbox 360, or fast as up to mid-90s supercomputer, if we utterly completely ignore obvious node interconnect problem.

There are useful things that don't need a lot of interconnect speed. For example all of those XYZ@home projects (SETI, primes ...), or finding the hash for bitcoin blocks. Those just need aggregate speed and low energy use per computation.

This particular CPU might or might not have instructions needed to make those particular computations efficient, of course.

How many of them can be done with 2 kB RAM per node? ;)

I like this project. It is not very useful - but it does not need to be, nor does it try :D

this things still need "enough" per-node performance, which potentially involve multiple cores with fast interconnects and definitely involves having enough RAM and cache etc.

also while the latency for @home projects are higher the bandwidth of your internet upload/download might be faster then what that cluster has effectively (due to the shared bus)

through this doesn't mean anything in the end

the project wasn't about creating a faster DIY special purpose compute system at home or anything like that

it's about a cool challenging and inspiring tech hobby project

it's 20KB (0.02MB, 0.00002GB) data RAM per CPU

You are not going to get anything useful supercomputer-wise with that much RAM.

Le sigh?

Is it me, or is the redditisation of this site no longer a semi-noob illusion?

I think you're annoyed by the phrasing but it's otherwise a substantive comment. Take a minute to look up dmitrygr's projects.

Le .. phrasing hasn't been around for like 10 years there.

Welcome to millennial nerd facebook, where we fondly remember when reddit was fun ;)

Why isn't it a cluster?

it is a cluster without question

compared to a super computer cluster a small highly simplified cluster with a fraction of total practical compute power then even a single node of many other cluster system but still a cluster

and the way it has blades and a bunch with each having multiple cards on them and a single shared buss connecting all of them and then a higher level bus which interconnects the blades is (from a generic far away POV) quite similar to how super computer cluster might be build, just much much simpler

This other DIY youtube dude is making a camera sensor from scratch.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40324370

Perhaps watch that video instead if you're disappointed about tfa.

> Whoever wrote the wccftech article

TBH this article sounds like it was written by an LLM using a transcript of the video or something.

It has that LLM smell for me.

Not sure how useful this is, and the media hype is probably stupid.

But I'm a fan of Bitluni. He has created a few pretty fun projects and is quite active in the local hacker scene

Mega- scale means something more than 10^6.

256 means 1/4 of kilo- only.

Cluster? A cluster is basically anything. Take 100 bricks and stack them nicely, it will be a cluster of 100 bricks. But it won't even be a barn.

It's boring, girls :)

It's still quite an interesting project, girl.

Just because it's a super simplified cluster compared to any real world project doesn't mean it's boring or that you don't learn anything from it. But it means it is affordable to do as a hobby project.

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