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myrmidontoday at 8:32 AM2 repliesview on HN

Yes, if you want all the drawbacks of distributed computing with none of the advantages: You'd probably be stuck with something UART based as interconnect, Every core is gonna have way too little RAM to do anything useful, you are missing like half the instruction set (floating point operations in software), and power draw at 4mW minimum per core adds up quickly to something that an efficient laptop-CPU would use.

On top of all this, latency for anything is gonna be abysmal because the cores are so slow...

I honestly don't see an application where this is even close to desirable.

Would be fun, tough, to have a 10-stack of PCBs with 10 by 10 CPUs each for a thousand cores (=> ~4W power @1.8V).


Replies

imtringuedtoday at 8:54 AM

Using it as a cluster is probably a bad idea, but you could probably build a 2d sensor grid using these. The 8 pin restriction is extremely limiting though. If you have an FSR matrix, you could connect a 2x2 grid to each MCU and then connect each row in a daisy chain configuration.

aa-jvtoday at 8:36 AM

Maybe not practical as a cluster configuration, but it could certainly be used as a voice-generating device for a synthesizer, or as a controlling device for MIDI I/O, or .. both even of course, configurable according to the users needs/patch idea.

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