systems
The next version will have 32,000 MCUs
If you can't afford a graphics card these days, here's an alternative solution. Just order thousands of microcontrollers, design your own boards, and build your own cluster over the course of six months after dealing with a healthy dose of setbacks.At the end of it, you might even have something able to light up the equivalent of a QVGA display with a whopping resolution of 320x200 for your efforts and, as electrical engineering and software development YouTuber bitluni said of his creation, nearly the loss of your sanity.
Describing his homebrewed GPU cluster as his “nemesis,” bitluni didn’t even intend to build the device, which was designed around 8,192 $0.13 CH570 RISC-V MCUs connected to custom-designed PCBs and controlled by another 256 larger cores with FPUs. The six-month saga actually began after bitluni published a video last year detailing his original homemade GPU, which led to PCB design software firm Altium reaching out about partnering for a project.
“The clusters I made before were already challenging my sanity,” bitluni explained in the cluster video he published over the weekend. “I thought I was done with the topic, but the budget and these tools would allow for a cluster of a different magnitude, and the magnitude I had in mind was just insane.”
