[Request] Add native support for the Parallella board

[xD0135]

Hi, could you please add native support to nsgminer for the Parallella FPGA board so it can be used to mine NeoScrypt? I can even give you ssh access to the board itself so you can test/compile in it. Thanks!

[ghostlander]

The Parallella is an ARM A9 processor with a 16-core Epiphany co-processor programmable in C/C++ and OpenCL, so it isn't an FPGA board technically. Although it's a 65nm chip with only 512Kb of internal memory shared by all cores, so the performance may not be very impressive. Anyway, I need to get the board myself to make optimisations. What performance do you get with the CPU mining code in NSGminer?

[xD0135]

@ghostlander Thanks for the reply. The mining performance just with the dual ARM CPU is quite negligible:

5s:  0.5 avg:  0.5 u:  0.0 KH/s | A:0 R:0 S:0 HW:0 WU:0.00/m
ST:2  DW:38  GW:20  LW:102  GF:0  NB:14  AS:0  RF:0  E:0.00

Based on https://github.com/LordRafa/Parallella-cgminer I was under the impression (or at least being hopeful) that the speed would be somewhat reasonable with the 16-core Epiphany due to its fast data transfer speed. Unfortunately that project is so old that I'm not even able to run benchmarks to verify.

The [nice] premise of Parallella is that one can use e-link cables and cluster several units to behave as one. And I would hope that having a cluster of 4 yielding 64 Epiphany CPU cores would be a nice mining rig.

In case your suspicion holds true that it isn't worth it, what other FPGAs can you recommend that can/may produce a nice hashing output? Thanks.

[ghostlander]

It could be acceptable due to low power consumption, though 32 GFLOPS they advertise for their 65nm chip is still very low. Modern GPUs are much more powerful. The RX 580 offers 6175 GFLOPS. Even modern general purpose CPUs advertise hundreds GFLOPS. So, unless Parallella starts to sell their 28nm 64-core chip of ~100 GFLOPS, there is no practical mining use. Unfortunately, most FPGAs are also losing to GPUs in TCO means.

[xD0135]

@ghostlander I'm still interested in having nsgminer working on the Epiphany cores in Parallella, specially because of its price point. This would enable anyone without loads of cash to buy and setup a GPU rig to get their feet in the crypto world by spending a couple of hundred bucks on this board. Would you please reconsider adding support? Thanks

[ghostlander]

Speaking of cost, a single used R9 280X is less expensive than a Parallella board, definitely much more capable and easily obtainable. Although it comes at expence of a much higher power consumption. I may add support for this board in the future, but I assign this task a low priority.

[xD0135]

Thanks @ghostlander. I can perhaps try to give it a go if you can give me some starting pointers.