News YouTuber built a 256-core RISC-V megacluster because he could

[Admin]

One gadget builder extraordinaire has designed and built his own supercomputer, and showed the world how he did it.

YouTuber built a 256-core RISC-V megacluster because he could : Read more

 

[das_stig]

Imagine having a consumer motherboard that you could just plug in multiple riser cards all hosting multiple low cost, low power efficient (ie instant zero power sleep mode when not needed) but very capable processors to create your own supercluster, maybe we can finally play Cyberpunk 2077 as it was envisaged to be.

 

[oofdragon]

So... the article doesnt mention how much did it cost him and neither what are the practical uses to this megacluster. Like will it run linix, windows or what? Will it zip files faster than a Ryzen 7950X3D, will it give more gaming fps than it and etc?

 

[Pierce2623]

Imagine having a consumer motherboard that you could just plug in multiple riser cards all hosting multiple low cost, low power efficient (ie instant zero power sleep mode when not needed) but very capable processors to create your own supercluster, maybe we can finally play Cyberpunk 2077 as it was envisaged to be.

If you think the average consumer is ready for multiple CPUs, I get the impression you’ve never used a multiple CPU server. It would make much more sense to just give consumers access to more cores on consumer CPUs. If Intel or AMD would sell a consumer CPU with like 32-48 e cores and 64 pcie lanes for about $5-600, I’d snap it up in a second.

 

[Pierce2623]

So... the article doesnt mention how much did it cost him and neither what are the practical uses to this megacluster. Like will it run linix, windows or what? Will it zip files faster than a Ryzen 7950X3D, will it give more gaming fps than it and etc?

I guess it should at least run Linux since it’s risc v

 

[DougMcC]

So... the article doesnt mention how much did it cost him and neither what are the practical uses to this megacluster. Like will it run linix, windows or what? Will it zip files faster than a Ryzen 7950X3D, will it give more gaming fps than it and etc?

It will probably not compete with the Ryzen on anything. Even if IPC were equal, it doesn't deliver nearly as many cycles as that Ryzen. Plus you have to deal with trying to scale whatever you are running across that many cpus, and very few things will scale perfectly across quite that many cpus.

 

[das_stig]

Socket motherboards like dimm slots are old world, the idea of a motherboard with slots that just fill with daughter boards with whatever cpu, gpu, npu or memory or whatever or mixture of all of them is what we should be aiming for, sort of going back to the old school days of everything being a plugin card, memory, fpu, x86 board.

 

[bit_user]

So... the article doesnt mention ... what are the practical uses to this megacluster. Like will it run linix, windows or what? Will it zip files faster than a Ryzen 7950X3D, will it give more gaming fps than it and etc?

1. None.
2. No, no.
3. No.
4. No.

If these chips weren't so primitive, you might be able to do some interesting realtime signal processing with them. That's something people did with these sorts of architectures, in the past. Much beyond that, such an architecture is too hard to program and doesn't run off-the-self software, so real-world applications would be very limited.

But I did say if. The article mentions these are just microcontrollers, although they do have floating-point, apparently. Still, they probably just have in-order, single-issue scalar pipelines and don't support external DRAM, much less a full-blown OS kernel.

 

[bit_user]

I guess it should at least run Linux since it’s risc v

In a mere 64 kB of SRAM? No.

https://github.com/openwch/ch32v307
​

These are just 32-bit microcontrollers. They don't even support external DRAM. They're meant for embedding in small appliances and IoT sorts of things.

 

[lvt]

Imagine having a consumer motherboard that you could just plug in multiple riser cards all hosting multiple low cost, low power efficient (ie instant zero power sleep mode when not needed) but very capable processors to create your own supercluster, maybe we can finally play Cyberpunk 2077 as it was envisaged to be.

I remember having seen such motherboard, it's used for Bitcoin mining.

 

[Pierce2623]

In a mere 64 kB of SRAM? No.

​

https://github.com/openwch/ch32v307​

​

These are just 32-bit microcontrollers. They don't even support external DRAM. They're meant for embedding in small appliances and IoT sorts of things.

Then what’s even the point if there’s no OS? You can use microcontrollers as a cpu though. Look at the Raspberry Pi Zero. It’s sold as a microcontroller. If this thing literally only blinks LEDs then I’ve never seen something this stupid.

 

[bit_user]

Then what’s even the point if there’s no OS?

Arduino has no proper OS, but lots of people find interesting things to do with them. For that matter the Commodore 64 had as much RAM and probably about as much of an OS (also ran like 0.1% as fast), yet people found plenty of things to do with them.

If you mean what's the point of assembling them into an array, you'd have to ask the one who built this.

You can use microcontrollers as a cpu though. Look at the Raspberry Pi Zero. It’s sold as a microcontroller.

Uh, you mean Pico? Yeah, I gather that's meant as an answer to Arduino.

https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-pico/

 

[init0]

Then what’s even the point if there’s no OS? You can use microcontrollers as a cpu though. Look at the Raspberry Pi Zero. It’s sold as a microcontroller. If this thing literally only blinks LEDs then I’ve never seen something this stupid.

Have you ever looked in the mirror. Or is it jealousy. What have you created that is better? What one does with one time is theirs. This guy all superior.

 

[Compdoc21]

Such an industrious person and he learned so much from this project, be interesting to see future projects, especially one that could run Linux.

 

[Jeff Butts]

So... the article doesnt mention how much did it cost him and neither what are the practical uses to this megacluster. Like will it run linix, windows or what? Will it zip files faster than a Ryzen 7950X3D, will it give more gaming fps than it and etc?

That's because the creator didn't provide that information. It's not running any particular operating system, though, because he hasn't developed it to that point. He's just using microcontrollers with a blink routine embedded to make the LEDs flash.

In its current state, the megacluster is just a collection of RISC-V CPUs with GPIO headers. Think of it more along the lines of an Arduino project right now rather than an actual computer.

To be a computer, he still needs to incorporate a GPU, storage, etc. That might be part of his roadmap, but he doesn't say in that video...just says he'll post more in a later video.

 

[bit_user]

To be a computer, he still needs to incorporate a GPU, storage, etc. That might be part of his roadmap, but he doesn't say in that video...just says he'll post more in a later video.

I've seen (well, mostly just read about) plenty of processor arrays like this. It's not and will never be a general-purpose computer. That just makes no sense, because it lacks the basic facilities to run a general-purpose OS and support modern peripherals like SSDs, GPUs, etc.

The most sensible thing you could do with something like this is to make it a dedicated compute accelerator that's somehow connected to & controlled by a proper, general purpose CPU. Even in the best case scenario, I don't expect it would out-perform optimized AVX code running on something like a Raptor Lake i7 or better, though one advantage of not having an OS is that you can get very consistent performance and deterministic latencies. So, for high-performance realtime signal processing applications, arrays of DSPs or FPGAs tend to be pretty popular (or at least they were, in the past).