Parallela board - interesting for FreeSWITCH?
Does anyone here have an opinion on the Parallela board - http://www.adapteva.com/products/parallella/parallella/ - as a platform for FreeSWITCH? Could it be appropriate for applications that need to be small and inexpensive, but also capable of doing a fair amount of real-time transcoding? Bob
I know that on a VIA Eden with 512mb ram, I could have a few calls going without transcoding and it used 20 to 50% cpu, at 800mhz. I'm guessing that would be somewhere in the ballpark of this board. There's a few of these ARM boards popping up to compete with Raspberry Pi, I was looking at the CubieBoard for around AU$80 on ebay, shipped with a plastic case. For a customer with less than ten extensions, an IVR or two and voicemail, it's a very tempting experiment to try! The only catch I can see is kernel support for your preferred distro. Debian has armhf, don't know about the others. Allwinner, the chip that Cubieboard is based on has some far flung patches in upstream and there's some custom firmware images at linux-sunxi.org. I was _almost_ on the button to buy one, but I scored 15 T5745 thin clients with Atom N280/1GB ram for $30 each, so I shelved the idea for the time being. Which brings me to another question: Is it really worth the fiddling around, when I can import a complete, new Atom/Intel based thin client for around $150, with full kernel and driver support plus expansion capabilities? Maybe in a year or two, We might see fully supported ARM based units with the same support/options for $50. :) Francis <http://linux-sunxi.org/Main_Page> On 29/12/2013 9:20 AM, Bob Hartwig wrote:
Does anyone here have an opinion on the Parallela board - http://www.adapteva.com/products/parallella/parallella/ - as a platform for FreeSWITCH? Could it be appropriate for applications that need to be small and inexpensive, but also capable of doing a fair amount of real-time transcoding?
Bob
_________________________________________________________________________ Professional FreeSWITCH Consulting Services: consulting@freeswitch.org http://www.freeswitchsolutions.com
FreeSWITCH-powered IP PBX: The CudaTel Communication Server http://www.cudatel.com
Official FreeSWITCH Sites http://www.freeswitch.org http://wiki.freeswitch.org http://www.cluecon.com
FreeSWITCH-users mailing list FreeSWITCH-users@lists.freeswitch.org http://lists.freeswitch.org/mailman/listinfo/freeswitch-users UNSUBSCRIBE:http://lists.freeswitch.org/mailman/options/freeswitch-users http://www.freeswitch.org
I use little ARM-based boards like the BeagleBone Black and Raspberry Pi for FreeSWITCH in our lab, and they work great for small setups. The interesting and different thing about the Parallela board is the 16 / 64 core RISC chip, which is programmable in C and C++. I can envision offloading transcoding and other CPU-intensive tasks to those cores. Hard to say if it will be stable when it's finally released, and I don't know enough about that chip to know if it's up to the task. Bob On Mon, Dec 30, 2013 at 10:53 AM, Francis <sms@icefire.qza.net.au> wrote:
I know that on a VIA Eden with 512mb ram, I could have a few calls going without transcoding and it used 20 to 50% cpu, at 800mhz. I'm guessing that would be somewhere in the ballpark of this board.
There's a few of these ARM boards popping up to compete with Raspberry Pi, I was looking at the CubieBoard for around AU$80 on ebay, shipped with a plastic case. For a customer with less than ten extensions, an IVR or two and voicemail, it's a very tempting experiment to try! The only catch I can see is kernel support for your preferred distro. Debian has armhf, don't know about the others. Allwinner, the chip that Cubieboard is based on has some far flung patches in upstream and there's some custom firmware images at linux-sunxi.org. I was _almost_ on the button to buy one, but I scored 15 T5745 thin clients with Atom N280/1GB ram for $30 each, so I shelved the idea for the time being.
Which brings me to another question: Is it really worth the fiddling around, when I can import a complete, new Atom/Intel based thin client for around $150, with full kernel and driver support plus expansion capabilities? Maybe in a year or two, We might see fully supported ARM based units with the same support/options for $50. :)
Francis
<http://linux-sunxi.org/Main_Page> On 29/12/2013 9:20 AM, Bob Hartwig wrote:
Does anyone here have an opinion on the Parallela board - http://www.adapteva.com/products/parallella/parallella/ - as a platform for FreeSWITCH? Could it be appropriate for applications that need to be small and inexpensive, but also capable of doing a fair amount of real-time transcoding?
Bob
_________________________________________________________________________ Professional FreeSWITCH Consulting Services:consulting@freeswitch.orghttp://www.freeswitchsolutions.com
FreeSWITCH-powered IP PBX: The CudaTel Communication Serverhttp://www.cudatel.com
Official FreeSWITCH Siteshttp://www.freeswitch.orghttp://wiki.freeswitch.orghttp://www.cluecon.com
FreeSWITCH-users mailing listFreeSWITCH-users@lists.freeswitch.orghttp://lists.freeswitch.org/mailman/listinfo/freeswitch-users UNSUBSCRIBE:http://lists.freeswitch.org/mailman/options/freeswitch-usershttp://www.frees...
_________________________________________________________________________ Professional FreeSWITCH Consulting Services: consulting@freeswitch.org http://www.freeswitchsolutions.com
FreeSWITCH-powered IP PBX: The CudaTel Communication Server http://www.cudatel.com
Official FreeSWITCH Sites http://www.freeswitch.org http://wiki.freeswitch.org http://www.cluecon.com
FreeSWITCH-users mailing list FreeSWITCH-users@lists.freeswitch.org http://lists.freeswitch.org/mailman/listinfo/freeswitch-users UNSUBSCRIBE:http://lists.freeswitch.org/mailman/options/freeswitch-users http://www.freeswitch.org
The balance of doing embedded platforms is always trying to get it done before traditional x86 catches up to you. I think at least arm is popular enough that it has dedicated distros and maintainers so there is a lot more access to legacy tools. On Mon, Dec 30, 2013 at 11:09 AM, Bob Hartwig <bobjects@gmail.com> wrote:
I use little ARM-based boards like the BeagleBone Black and Raspberry Pi for FreeSWITCH in our lab, and they work great for small setups. The interesting and different thing about the Parallela board is the 16 / 64 core RISC chip, which is programmable in C and C++. I can envision offloading transcoding and other CPU-intensive tasks to those cores. Hard to say if it will be stable when it's finally released, and I don't know enough about that chip to know if it's up to the task.
Bob
On Mon, Dec 30, 2013 at 10:53 AM, Francis <sms@icefire.qza.net.au> wrote:
I know that on a VIA Eden with 512mb ram, I could have a few calls going without transcoding and it used 20 to 50% cpu, at 800mhz. I'm guessing that would be somewhere in the ballpark of this board.
There's a few of these ARM boards popping up to compete with Raspberry Pi, I was looking at the CubieBoard for around AU$80 on ebay, shipped with a plastic case. For a customer with less than ten extensions, an IVR or two and voicemail, it's a very tempting experiment to try! The only catch I can see is kernel support for your preferred distro. Debian has armhf, don't know about the others. Allwinner, the chip that Cubieboard is based on has some far flung patches in upstream and there's some custom firmware images at linux-sunxi.org. I was _almost_ on the button to buy one, but I scored 15 T5745 thin clients with Atom N280/1GB ram for $30 each, so I shelved the idea for the time being.
Which brings me to another question: Is it really worth the fiddling around, when I can import a complete, new Atom/Intel based thin client for around $150, with full kernel and driver support plus expansion capabilities? Maybe in a year or two, We might see fully supported ARM based units with the same support/options for $50. :)
Francis
<http://linux-sunxi.org/Main_Page> On 29/12/2013 9:20 AM, Bob Hartwig wrote:
Does anyone here have an opinion on the Parallela board - http://www.adapteva.com/products/parallella/parallella/ - as a platform for FreeSWITCH? Could it be appropriate for applications that need to be small and inexpensive, but also capable of doing a fair amount of real-time transcoding?
Bob
_________________________________________________________________________ Professional FreeSWITCH Consulting Services:consulting@freeswitch.orghttp://www.freeswitchsolutions.com
FreeSWITCH-powered IP PBX: The CudaTel Communication Serverhttp://www.cudatel.com
Official FreeSWITCH Siteshttp://www.freeswitch.orghttp://wiki.freeswitch.orghttp://www.cluecon.com
FreeSWITCH-users mailing listFreeSWITCH-users@lists.freeswitch.orghttp://lists.freeswitch.org/mailman/listinfo/freeswitch-users UNSUBSCRIBE:http://lists.freeswitch.org/mailman/options/freeswitch-usershttp://www.frees...
_________________________________________________________________________ Professional FreeSWITCH Consulting Services: consulting@freeswitch.org http://www.freeswitchsolutions.com
FreeSWITCH-powered IP PBX: The CudaTel Communication Server http://www.cudatel.com
Official FreeSWITCH Sites http://www.freeswitch.org http://wiki.freeswitch.org http://www.cluecon.com
FreeSWITCH-users mailing list FreeSWITCH-users@lists.freeswitch.org http://lists.freeswitch.org/mailman/listinfo/freeswitch-users UNSUBSCRIBE:http://lists.freeswitch.org/mailman/options/freeswitch-users http://www.freeswitch.org
_________________________________________________________________________ Professional FreeSWITCH Consulting Services: consulting@freeswitch.org http://www.freeswitchsolutions.com
FreeSWITCH-powered IP PBX: The CudaTel Communication Server http://www.cudatel.com
Official FreeSWITCH Sites http://www.freeswitch.org http://wiki.freeswitch.org http://www.cluecon.com
FreeSWITCH-users mailing list FreeSWITCH-users@lists.freeswitch.org http://lists.freeswitch.org/mailman/listinfo/freeswitch-users UNSUBSCRIBE:http://lists.freeswitch.org/mailman/options/freeswitch-users http://www.freeswitch.org
-- Anthony Minessale II ♬ @anthmfs ♬ @FreeSWITCH ♬ ☞ http://freeswitch.org/ ☞ http://cluecon.com/ ☞ http://twitter.com/FreeSWITCH ☞ irc.freenode.net #freeswitch ☞ *http://freeswitch.org/g+ <http://freeswitch.org/g+>* ClueCon Weekly Development Call ☎ sip:888@conference.freeswitch.org ☎ +19193869900
what you get with Parallela, is a number of small cores, each with quite average performance, but these cores are interconnected in a high-performance parallel matrix. I think it will take several man-months to integrate some processing functionality in FreeSWITCH for this platform. But then you will end up with a number of patches and hacks which are usable with one hardware platform only. Code maintenance will be some challenging task too. Also it's not clear how multi-threaded real-time communication is possible within Parallela platform. ________________________________ From: Bob Hartwig <bobjects@gmail.com> To: FreeSWITCH Users Help <freeswitch-users@lists.freeswitch.org> Sent: Monday, December 30, 2013 6:09 PM Subject: Re: [Freeswitch-users] Parallela board - interesting for FreeSWITCH? I use little ARM-based boards like the BeagleBone Black and Raspberry Pi for FreeSWITCH in our lab, and they work great for small setups. The interesting and different thing about the Parallela board is the 16 / 64 core RISC chip, which is programmable in C and C++. I can envision offloading transcoding and other CPU-intensive tasks to those cores. Hard to say if it will be stable when it's finally released, and I don't know enough about that chip to know if it's up to the task. Bob On Mon, Dec 30, 2013 at 10:53 AM, Francis <sms@icefire.qza.net.au> wrote: I know that on a VIA Eden with 512mb ram, I could have a few calls going without transcoding and it used 20 to 50% cpu, at 800mhz. I'm guessing that would be somewhere in the ballpark of this board.
There's a few of these ARM boards popping up to compete with
Raspberry Pi, I was looking at the CubieBoard for around AU$80 on ebay, shipped with a plastic case. For a customer with less than ten extensions, an IVR or two and voicemail, it's a very tempting experiment to try! The only catch I can see is kernel support for your preferred distro. Debian has armhf, don't know about the others. Allwinner, the chip that Cubieboard is based on has some far flung patches in upstream and there's some custom firmware images at linux-sunxi.org. I was _almost_ on the button to buy one, but I scored 15 T5745 thin clients with Atom N280/1GB ram for $30 each, so I shelved the idea for the time being.
Which brings me to another question: Is it really worth the fiddling
around, when I can import a complete, new Atom/Intel based thin client for around $150, with full kernel and driver support plus expansion capabilities? Maybe in a year or two, We might see fully supported ARM based units with the same support/options for $50. :)
Francis
On 29/12/2013 9:20 AM, Bob Hartwig wrote:
Does anyone here have an opinion on the Parallela board - http://www.adapteva.com/products/parallella/parallella/ - as a platform for FreeSWITCH? Could it be appropriate for applications that need to be small and inexpensive, but also capable of doing a fair amount of real-time transcoding?
Bob
_________________________________________________________________________
Professional FreeSWITCH Consulting Services: consulting@freeswitch.org http://www.freeswitchsolutions.com FreeSWITCH-powered IP PBX: The CudaTel Communication Server http://www.cudatel.com Official FreeSWITCH Sites http://www.freeswitch.org http://wiki.freeswitch.org http://www.cluecon.com FreeSWITCH-users mailing list FreeSWITCH-users@lists.freeswitch.org http://lists.freeswitch.org/mailman/listinfo/freeswitch-users UNSUBSCRIBE:http://lists.freeswitch.org/mailman/options/freeswitch-users http://www.freeswitch.org
_________________________________________________________________________ Professional FreeSWITCH Consulting Services: consulting@freeswitch.org http://www.freeswitchsolutions.com
FreeSWITCH-powered IP PBX: The CudaTel Communication Server http://www.cudatel.com
Official FreeSWITCH Sites http://www.freeswitch.org http://wiki.freeswitch.org http://www.cluecon.com
FreeSWITCH-users mailing list FreeSWITCH-users@lists.freeswitch.org http://lists.freeswitch.org/mailman/listinfo/freeswitch-users UNSUBSCRIBE:http://lists.freeswitch.org/mailman/options/freeswitch-users http://www.freeswitch.org
_________________________________________________________________________ Professional FreeSWITCH Consulting Services: consulting@freeswitch.org http://www.freeswitchsolutions.com FreeSWITCH-powered IP PBX: The CudaTel Communication Server http://www.cudatel.com Official FreeSWITCH Sites http://www.freeswitch.org http://wiki.freeswitch.org http://www.cluecon.com FreeSWITCH-users mailing list FreeSWITCH-users@lists.freeswitch.org http://lists.freeswitch.org/mailman/listinfo/freeswitch-users UNSUBSCRIBE:http://lists.freeswitch.org/mailman/options/freeswitch-users http://www.freeswitch.org
participants (4)
-
Anthony Minessale
-
Bob Hartwig
-
Francis
-
Stanislav Sinyagin