To all those with a trigger reflex on buy-buttons for cute hardware: please think twice about what you think you're doing, or rather what you're really getting!
It is really little more than an "uncluttering device" to put 4 PIs (or Jetson Nanos or yet-nots) in a box, while such modules are not included: ~$200 may seem a little much, by the time it's delivered--or RP4's are back in stock.
And for that kind of money you can in fact get a Jasper Lake N6005 based Atlas Canyon NUC that includes a SoC which will easily deliver the same class of compute power in a smaller form factor and finally can be purchased (I really want Gracemonts now!).
It expands to 32GB of RAM and allows you to run that cluster in VMs with very likely similar compute power but much greater flexibility and a much faster interconnect, because RAM is faster than any Ethernet, let alone Gbit. 8 PCIe 3.0 lanes may be less flexible than I'd want, but NVMe storage seems included while 2.5/5/10-NBase-T onboard Ethernet may be a pipe dream yet.
And please remember that clusters are really about fault tolerance first and scale-out computing second: the Turing PI 2 board is fully populated with things that can fail! So if resilience is your goal, you'd be much better off using individual RPs and dual switches.
The VM based cluster will offer just as little physical fault resilience and it won't nearly have as many blinking LEDs, but it might be much more usable for real workloads, once you figured out that training machine learning networks on a cluster of meek CPUs is a) difficult b) slow c) terribly inefficient. Even for inferencing you'd want real NPUs, which none of the available modules provide.
The PI doesn't have any ML acceleration that I know of, Jetson Nanos do kinda, but at [inference] levels that are 4-6 generations back and who knows what MediaTek software support will look like, once hardware trickles down to the hobby sector.
Yes, the Jasper Lake won't be great for ML either, but if that's really your thing, at least you can add a Movidius stick or board with some software SDK support. And for ordinary Linux or Windows workloads, Jasper Lake will be both terribly boring (things just work!) and much more flexible: I'm pretty sure you could even run MacOS in a VM, if that's your fancy, even if I wouldn't know why anyone would want to bother.
IMHO the Turing Pi 2 is e-trash about to happen, completely irrational and even borderline as a tinkerer's toy.
I own a Jetson Nano and an RP4 8G and I'll concede their educational value, individually.
But mostly they taught me that almost everything else either much more efficient (mobile SoCs) or much faster ("notebook SoCs"): they are truly underperforming across all use cases, but at least quiet about it.
So going beyond one lesson learned and building clusters from underperformers, only multiplies disappointment and underperformance, it doesn't make them any better or more usable.
You're welcome not to believe me, so please no flames. But please waste a few brain cycles on this, before buying.
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