Matrox's Extio Reviewed 204
An anonymous reader writes "Looks like Matrox isn't as dead as some of us thought. This box of tricks lets you connect four displays up to a PC that's 250 meters away. All the graphic data is sent down a fiber optic cable to the Matrox box that then connects to the screens. To the end user it feels like they're working directly on the PC, but the PC can be locked away somewhere safe."
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these (Score:5, Interesting)
These would be so cool for demonstrations and conventions.
I wonder how many of these cards you could fit in a single computer ?
That's good.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Now we got more than $1K of equipment sitting on the desk... (according to the price on the article)
Re:Matrox never went away (Score:3, Interesting)
Indeed, the article quotes the price to be as reviewed £1,645.00 (Inc VAT). That's a chunk of change, to be sure.
My own solution (to cut a hole through two adjoining rooms) produces similar results, but is far less elegant. I'd be interested in such a device. Or, put another way, it may be that the limited consumer market includes people concerned about noise, clutter and peace of mind (like me), in addition to any number of other subgroups, like those into music recording or production. In my day, that last group included just about everyone under 18 with a part-time job.
From the article (Score:3, Interesting)
As per parents parent, this device is more like $2000 but the point is that if the ebove advice is followed, the data is safe. This seems like a worthwhile device for medical companies or other IP-heavy industries where the data is worth millions.
It is also much smaller and neater than buying a lot of computers to do the same job. And with several computers driving a display each or something like that, you'd be hard pressed to make them behave as one desktop.
Re:From the article (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these (Score:5, Interesting)
This was initially done for security reasons, and the first KVM Extenders we had couldn't forward sound or USB, but nowadays it's not a problem at all, and it's all done over cat5 cables.
Re:From the article (Score:4, Interesting)
Using a terminal, the data would still have to go from the server to the client to be displayed. For an MRI or somesuch device, this would be a huge amount of data, requiring the terminal to be quite powerful in itself (needing hard-drive and everything). Using this system, that is not necessary. I think any sysadmin will tell you that the fewer computers he/she has to admin, the better.
The application for this device is not crystal clear, a lot of the time a terminal would be an equally good (and probably cheaper) choice.
In my opinion, they will have a killer app if they can externalize the PCIE interface this way completely, allowing me to put any graphics card in the box and thereby create a mini-game-system with a maxi-server elsewhere where it can make all the hard-drive and DVD-drive noises it likes.
Then again, isn't it the graphics card that makes the most noise these days? Maybe it's not as killer as I would like to think. :)
Consumer version, please!! (Score:5, Interesting)
Here's what I'm pictuing: People spend tons of money to make their computer quiet and well-cooled. But if the thing lived in the cold basement, they could bolt in cheap gigantic fans and disturb noone. But here's the kicker: The basement computer would be a multi-user system, where all the users of the household (including, for example, the living room display) would be using the same system simultaneously. Their rooms would contain displays and input devices only, wired in by fiber. Even if that happens, they're unlikely to get in each others' way, since by then these things will have at least 16 processor cores for them to share. But it means that if a single user needs to do something processor-intensive, she'll have the power of a pretty serious 16-core machine behind her, while the kids browsing myspace from the same computer (but on a different display) won't even notice.
3D GPUs are also about to go seriously multicore, and resource division on those will be easier than it is with CPUs. So if there are two gamers in the house, they could share a powerful multicore card and get acceptable performance. But if only one of them is playing, he can hog the resources of all the cores, and turn everything up to eleven.
This paradigm of the basement computing appliance could revolutionize the way hardware is made and marketed. Multisocket motherboards for the mass market could easily become common, but I'm picturing also a system of arbitrary daughterboards with extra processing units, which will speed up the system without forcing the owner to scrap things. Sure it will become a giant lego-like mess that sounds like a jet, but that's OK. It's in the basement (and will by then hopefully have sane power management which will turn off absolutely every part of every chip which isn't being used).
My point is that normal households with multiple computers today duplicate a lot of resources which go wasted, since single user has the opportunity to use them all simultaneously. The way to fix that is to pool all the household's processing into a single, big, arbitrarily extensible machine which stays out of people's way. And for that, we need a good long-run digital video over fiber standard. And maybe, with all the excess heat these things will put off, they really could double as the hot water heater!
Silent PC users rejoice (Score:3, Interesting)
We have a friend who damaged her ear in an accident and simply can't tolerate any level of white noise or background humming. Her and her husband have gone so far as to build onto their house and concentrate all of the noisy appliances into the new section so that the rest of the house can be silent. When they visit our house, we unplug the refrigerator while they're around.
When I tell her husband about this, he will place an order within the hour. They've had a hard time getting a silent PC that's quiet enough (yes, her ear is really that damaged) but still reasonably nice, and I'm certain they'd rather have a high-end, powerful PC that can sit in the "noisy part" of the house and still be absolutely silent at her desk.
Re:Didn't I see this in... (Score:3, Interesting)
What was the resolution on that twinax? Did it do 1920x1200 times 4 (source: product info page [matrox.com])? Have the equivalent of 6 USB 2.0 ports? Support digital sound transport? Work on commodity hardware?
Remote displays have been around for quite a while, but this is the modern incarnation of it. I'm not going to turn town a terabyte SATA drive just because I used a DEC with hard drives in the 70s.
Because most of us (myself included) didn't know that such a thing existed until we read this story.
For the same reason IBM did it in 1970: so you can use a computer without sitting right next to it.
BY GOD !! I wanted to do that JUST this morning ! (Score:0, Interesting)
BY GOD !! I wanted to do that JUST this morning !! Praise the saints at matrox !!
i had a similar requirement (Score:2, Interesting)