DIY gadget YouTuber "Bitluni" has built his own personal RISC-V megacluster, inside of a compact design, check it out:
Overall, the megacluster features 256 x RISC-V-based microcontrollers, operating at a mind-boggling 14.7GHz single-core frequency. Impressive. Remember, these are RISC-V chips, not x86-based processors inside of a regular PC.
The idea behind this is to fit 16 of the superclusters into a single interface, but that created issues down the line, so he designed his own "cluster blade" that featured two microcontrollers mounted on the board, each of them managing the supercluster on top of it. The cluster blade allowed Bitluni to give each supercluster its bus interface.
Each of the cluster blades features two CH32V203 microcontrollers mounted, with the DIY gadget guru combining 8 of them to form one big uniform layer. Through the assembly process, he had to solder each microcontroller onto the circuit board, and then attach the GPIO pins to enter the testing phase.
After a while, he found a major design flaw: he missed an internal clock source, causing the LEDs mounted to show functionality to blink in random, uncertain patterns. After he played around with the program and went through debugging the bus synchronization, Bitluni found the functionality he was looking for in his DIY cluster.
Bitluni explained through his YouTube description of the video:
- This new cluster build escalated quickly. Especially with the bugs I built in but here are some specs:
- 256x RISC-V 48MHz
- 17x RISC-V 144MHz
- 640x GPIO
- 256x ADC
- 17x 8-Bit bus
- Combined single core clock rate would be 14.7GHz not that impressive but also not too shabby.