The CH32V line of 32-bit RISC-V microcontrollers has soared in recognition with the {hardware} hacking group over the previous few years. This recognition is due not a lot to their so-so efficiency, however as a result of they’re low-cost — actually low-cost. In giant portions, a 48MHz CH32V003F4P6 chip might be had for little greater than a dime.
{A partially}-populated board (📷: Ronan Mingon)
This value level has led many hackers to assume large when designing their initiatives across the CH32V. Electronics hobbyist Ronan Mingon, as an example, just lately got here up with the concept of constructing a computing cluster out of those chips. A big computing cluster could also be prohibitively costly when coping with conventional computing {hardware}, however through the use of CH32V microcontrollers, it solely prices a couple of bucks. Positive, the efficiency isn’t anyplace close to the identical stage, but it surely may make for a pleasant experimentation platform all the identical.
So Mingon designed and constructed a customized 24-node RISC-V cluster. It’s composed of 1 CH32V307RCT6 controller node and 24 CH32V003F4P6 employee nodes. The chips are all laid out on a customized printed circuit board, and they’re interconnected through Ethernet. Every node has an LED that serves as an exercise indicator, and the controller node has an exterior Ethernet interface for customers to work together with. The thought is that jobs can be launched onto the employee nodes by the controller, enabling large-scaled parallelism.
The circuit diagram (📷: Ronan Mingon)
Mingon describes the cluster as providing 1.3GHz of processing energy for under $10, though including up the clock speeds of the person nodes could also be considerably deceptive. However in any case, that is undoubtedly an extremely cheap option to play with a big cluster of computing nodes. It’s not the primary such cluster we now have seen, nevertheless. Final yr, bitluni created a 256-core supercluster of CH32V003 microcontrollers. However Mingon’s slimmed-down design could be extra accessible for many individuals, so it’s nonetheless effectively value testing.
