Topic: Primecoin Mining Rig - Parallela - page 2. (Read 11603 times)

Wow you can beat a Corei5 with 99$ computer! That's insane!

The Coremark benchmark is not a floating point benchmark, it's main focus is read/write operations, integer operations, and control operations.  Generally speaking the Epiphany coprocessor was designed to do floating point math very quickly.  This test is probably not really a 100% good representation of it's ability of doing integer ops, due to it being biased by other external factors (read/write etc).

The Epiphany 3 with 16 cores has a core mark of: 19478 and costs $99
The Intel Xeon Processor E5-2687W has a core mark of: 400116 and costs $1890 plus say another $400 for a computer build: ~$2290

20 Epiphany 3s would be about the same speed as that Xeon.  and if you built that using their cluster kits, it would cost. ~2875.

Granted you could probably build two or three computers with more total computing power and cheaper than using that insane Xeon, and probably get your costs down even further.

Furthermore, unless you are a coder, you are going to have a bad time.  You won't be able to just drop the primecoin miner into a paralella and hit go.  There will need to be some code rewriting and optimizations done to the code, at very least you will have to significantly edit the make file to make it compile for the coprocessor.

The Epiphany 4 with 64 cores that is not yet available on the other hand has a core mark of: 78748.80 but the price is unknown, as well as the availability.

So right now, i would say No, i don't think the Parallela is a good bet.

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Excellent post! I guess I will stick to the VPS route until the Epiphany 4s come out and see what the price/performance trade-off is there.  Hopefully if it makes sense price/performance, and the gpu miner is not refined to be much more efficient than it currently is, an experienced coder with re-work primecoin miner for the parallela.

Here's a benchmark i found:


The Coremark benchmark is not a floating point benchmark, it's main focus is read/write operations, integer operations, and control operations.  Generally speaking the Epiphany coprocessor was designed to do floating point math very quickly.  This test is probably not really a 100% good representation of it's ability of doing integer ops, due to it being biased by other external factors (read/write etc).

The Epiphany 3 with 16 cores has a core mark of: 19478 and costs $99
The Intel Xeon Processor E5-2687W has a core mark of: 400116 and costs $1890 plus say another $400 for a computer build: ~$2290

20 Epiphany 3s would be about the same speed as that Xeon.  and if you built that using their cluster kits, it would cost. ~2875.

Granted you could probably build two or three computers with more total computing power and cheaper than using that insane Xeon, and probably get your costs down even further.

Furthermore, unless you are a coder, you are going to have a bad time.  You won't be able to just drop the primecoin miner into a paralella and hit go.  There will need to be some code rewriting and optimizations done to the code, at very least you will have to significantly edit the make file to make it compile for the coprocessor.

The Epiphany 4 with 64 cores that is not yet available on the other hand has a core mark of: 78748.80 but the price is unknown, as well as the availability.

So right now, i would say No, i don't think the Parallela is a good bet.

The parallella board do have a dual ARM core, but the real deal of the parallella is it's 16 core coprocessor (Epiphany).
I am not that sure if it could have a good performance crunching prime chains since it is not the kind of job that benefits much of parallellization (correct me if I am wrong).