Within the last year, economically priced Hardware platforms especially targeted to Makers appeared, such as Arduino (8bit Microcontroller platform dedicated to physical computing) or Raspberry Pi (full multimedia enabled 32bit CPU).
Now the Startup Adapteva plans to develop a basic open source platform for prallel computing. Adapteva calls the project Parallella Project, which represents a hardware platform with a proprietary Epiphany-CPU that supports from 16 up to 6 parallel RISC CPUs cores. Two Cortex-A9 cores are responsible for management tasks.
Adapteva just started a Kickstarter pledge in order to reach a budget of $750.000, in order to produce and ship the hardware.