At some stage Kickstarter was more about suggesting dreams rather than contracts.
As it turned out there were a few folks that appeared on the forums who had these kinds of misconceptions. After all this time there weren't that many; so I probably overestimated the number of people who signed on based on those misunderstandings.
Having said all that, I guess I should point out that while I do have a very skeptical view of kickstarter as a whole, I don't view Adapteva's kickstarter as being very unethical or as complete failure. They eventually were able to deliver on what I see a bare minimum of what they said they were going to do. Though I do feel we have to be honest and acknowledge that they weren't able to fully live up to all the claims and promises that were made... like you said "more about suggesting dreams than making contracts".
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/adapteva/parallella-a-s...
Kickstarter goal (first sentence from day 1): Making parallel computing easy to use has been described as "a problem as hard as any that computer science has faced". With such a big challenge ahead, we need to make sure that every programmer has access to cheap and open parallel hardware and development tools. Inspired by great hardware communities like Raspberry Pi and Arduino, we see a critical need for a truly open, high-performance computing platform that will close the knowledge gap in parallel programing. The goal of the Parallella project is to democratize access to parallel computing. If we can pull this off, who knows what kind of breakthrough applications could arise?"
Curious, besides being woefully late, what major promises did the Parallella campaign NOT live up to?
As far as major promises did the Parallella campaign NOT live up to (excluding the 64-core version), as far as I know it's still possible to connect multiple Parallella boards together using the Epiphany eLink interfaces. That novel interconnect was to me a key feature of the Epiphany architecture. Without it interfacing multiple Parallella boards together is forced to go through the Ethernet provided by the Zynq... which (assuming the eLink architecture performs as well as is claimed) is impediment & disappointment.
Without fully exploiting the eLink interconnect I think it's really difficult to get a full and accurate understanding of the capabilities and weaknesses of the Epiphany architecture.
Please don't take this in a personal or highly negative way. You guys have accomplished a lot and I really, really don't want to diminish that. You've also dealt with the difficulties that the project faced with a professional, straight forward, and positive demeanour, which I feel is both lacking in many other kickstarter campaigns and which speaks volumes for the quality of character of the developers working at Adaptiva.
I really want to see you guys succeed. I am still interested in buying / building a mini-cluster but I'm holding off until they can be properly interfaced through the eLink fabric. Also, I very much would like to see a next generation Epiphany chip and subsequent nextgen Parallella board, beyond the v2.0 Epiphany III Parallella board that was discussed in the forums.
Can GPUs do this. In my view, not a bad result considering 2014 general availability? How long (and how many $billions did it take for CUDA to catch on...)
https://www.parallella.org/2015/05/25/how-the-do-i-program-t...
In terms of cost, not really sure what you are referring to... supercomputer.io is free to researchers, which last time I checked is less than not zero.