Via Now Shipping Dual-Processor Mini-ITX Board 304
An anonymous reader writes "Via is now shipping its first dual-processor mini-ITX board. The DP-310 features two 1GHz processors, gigabit Ethernet, support for SATA drives, and a media-processing graphics chipset. It targets high-density applications -- according to Via, a 42-U rack with 168 processors would draw about 2.5 kilowatts, or about as much power as two hair dryers." This also looks like the basis for a nice car computer. Also on the small-computing front, an anonymous reader submits "General Micro, meanwhile, last week released what it calls the world's fastest mini-ITX board, powered by a Pentium M clocked up to 2.3GHz. "
Car computer? (Score:5, Interesting)
UniChrome Pro onboard GPU... (Score:3, Interesting)
Why both SATA and ATA-133 (Score:3, Interesting)
What board are those photos of? (Score:3, Interesting)
--marmite
Why does this thing STILL have PS/2 ports? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Cool mini-ITX stuff... (Score:3, Interesting)
I ran 2-MTX amps to the door speakers with a 12" Sub in the back. I had a USB hub that ran the Wifi bridge to sync things up when I pulled into the garage. I also had the Audigy USB processor, and USB GPS receiver. I had 13,000 MP3's at my fingertips, music videos (a sort of MTV on demand), GPS navigation, Outlook contacts, solitare, games, etc. All in 5.1 Surround sound rollin down the street.
The board could barely keep up with a DVD, and couldn't run Daemon tools to mount an image and play the movie from the HD(important because laptop DVD-RW would skip a lot).
Two processors would probably solve that problem. However, for some reason my board just stopped working. Need to figure out what happened. Overall a fun time consuming project that works fairly well. Still some integration that needs to happen, but Media Engine is Open source and actively developed. (Dev team are jerks most of the time though)
Re:Dual-processor car computer? (Score:4, Interesting)
We do railroad track geometry testing, and use a modified pickup truck to carry our equipment. A dual processor system would be better for us than our current setup. It would allow us to use one machine for data collection (especially the interrupt handling) and realtime analysis of the data. Additionally, the smaller form factor would allow us to have a lot more room in the back seat of our truck.
2 1GHz processors would be more than enough for our needs. We only have a 800MHz PIII right now.
Amps in your pants (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Why does this thing STILL have PS/2 ports? (Score:3, Interesting)
I've seen many a system brought down by a bad PS/2 keyboard.
Now I've seen USB keyboards that stopped working after a while, but I've never seen a system hang because of one.
Er.. yeah... (Score:3, Interesting)
I mean, dual proc is really nice for making a desktop system interactive since it drops latency to essentially zero, but you've got to have the speed there for when you need it too. The 1GHz via feels slower than a 1GHz intel CPU.
Something that would be really cool, though probably technically hard to do, is to get a decent processor and run it with a VIA or similar as the second CPU. That way you can cut about $100 off the price of a SMP system while still getting the fast response times from dual CPU. I mean, the acronym calls it SMP right? So AMP must be possible. Right?
Re:Car computer? (Score:3, Interesting)
Now I have a 6000kbps/400kbps broadband link to my home. What you call OS Bloat and graphics bloat I call useability increases.
I run Firefox, which allows for nice, handy tabbed browsing. It might be useable on a 233mhz computer, provided there was enough RAM, but I wouldn't push it.
While doing that, I'll have an IM Client open that allows for connection to all major IM networks.
I'm also going to have Thunderbird open, which allows for easy management of my RSS feeds along with email.
MP3 player will of course be running in the background, because I like to listen to music while I browse. That alone would tax the hell out of your 133mhz 5x86.
If I see a
I didn't say you NEED a faster machine for web browsing, but I wouldn't want to do it on something slower than about 500Mhz nowadays. The minute that I have to start shutting down applications so that I can do other work, I'm just going to start looking into an inexpensive upgrade route. If my computer is seriously inhibiting my ability to do what I want to do, then no amount of bitching about bloat is going to fix that problem. While bloat is there, advances have taken place in software since 1997 (the year of the P233), and you shouldn't just discount them because your system's too slow to use those applications.
Re:TV? (Score:5, Interesting)
The M and MII boards have well [viaarena.com] documented [wilsonet.com] DMA [bglug.ca] issues [epiawiki.org] There have been many attempts to contact VIA to discuss these, all have been actively ignored (we are pretty sure they are getting the messages).
What concerns me is that the problem has been fixed in windows, but Via wont even talk to linux people about it. That indicates a certain lack of interest in the linuxworld that bodes badly should problems arise with these new mobos. I would be very circumspect about picking up another mobo from them unless I was sure I wouldn't need support.
Just one jilted dudes opinion.
Re:cheap Linux servers? (Score:4, Interesting)
not much processing needs, but lots of storage space with little heat. unfortunately the next drives (400GB) are only at 7200 RPM, no longer 5400RM
SMP and AMP (Score:3, Interesting)
SMP is an O/S design choice, not a hardware thing. An SMP system is one in which all processors can be given all jobs. Assymetric MP systems are those on which this is not true: for instance Sun's first multiprocessor OS could run user code on all processors, but kernel code (including interrupt handlers) could only run on processor zero.
It's harder to write an SMP kernel than an AMP kernel if you start with a uniprocessor kernel - you don't need to introduce any new locks if you go the AMP route.
As to your proposal, I think dual-core desktops are close enough to make it irrelevant. Sorry.
Phil
Re:Car computer? (Score:2, Interesting)