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Hardware

Mini Dual-Celeron Board 77

Posted by timothy from the oh-and-could-you-make-that-a-double? dept.
Anonymous Coward writes: "Well, I thought I was pretty cool with my BP6 with dual 366s overclocked to 550 ... I just stumbled across what looks like a mini dual-slot 370 mobo. Up to 1GB RAM, flat-panel support, solid-state disk support. What *would* you use this for, a dual Celeron laptop!? I wonder if anyone makes a complete computer based on this board? Who are they selling this to?"
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Mini Dual-Celeron Board

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  • Um... duh? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This is obviously a *backplane card* for a passive-backplane server, good for something like a rackmounted unit... How the hell you'd use something like this in a laptop design, I have no clue.

    ---
    I'm not a real anonymous coward, I just play one on TV.

  • Rackmountable servers? (Score:3)

    by Rendus ( 2430 ) <rendus&gmail,com> on Friday April 21, 2000 @04:50PM (#1117828)
    Are they perhaps going after high density markets, such as rackmount servers and clusters? Just my initial thought on it.
  • I'm going to answer rwade, daviddennis, and hartsock all in this one post.

    A previous rwade post [slashdot.org] to this story got moderated down from the default +1 any registered user's posts get to a 0 and the moderation category was "overrated".

    This is by no means the first time that I've seen moderations that were just *barely* defensible.
    In metamoderation you might let it slide instead of calling it fair or unfair, not agreeing with it but giving the moderator the benefit of the doubt and not wanting to reduce the karma of one of Slashdot's "good" moderators.
    So someone gets away with a malicious moderation.
    Even if metamoderation zings them for it, rwade's karma has still taken a hit, maybe the one that's the final straw in taking away his moderator privileges, and costing us another "good" moderator.
    I think of these people as "attack moderators" [slashdot.org].
    Some of them are subtle like this one (about whom I *might* be mistaken, and apologise to in that unlikely event, but I'd want to know why that mod point wasn't put to better use elsewhere), others are a little more obviously out to get the person they moderated down.

    And I'm pretty sure that they have more than one account, so that they can use one or more for the moderation privileges, logging in as that account just enough to retain moderator eligibility (reading Slashdot too seldom or too frequently, or commenting too frequently, disqualifies you from being selected for moderation).
    I wouldn't be surprised if several people were acting together on this, moderating each other up and ganging up on people they take a dislike to.

    As regards the more juvenile of the trolls (and the source of attack moderators), although Slashdot would have grown larger and in need of a moderation system even if there were no such person as Jon Katz, when Katz appointed himself geek ambassador/evangelist he brought Slashdot to the attention of a lot of adolescents, some of them not too well adjusted socially, and all of them, like adolescents everywhere, with a lot of pent-up angers, frustrations, creative urges, fears, and passions in need of an outlet.

    Also, many have pointed out that this sort of behavior occurred on other sites where Slashdot would have been mentioned, where this sort of behavior is now blocked in some way, or has run off everyone else, depriving them of an audience to offend, or is no longer possible due to the demise of the site.

    I realise we're getting wa-a-ay off-topic here (especially me), but since this story was about a non-event (building a laptop with a passive backplane board), I feel as though I've made a greater contribution here than I would have with one more remark about the pointlessness of considering using a passive backplane board for building a laptop.

  • If you click on the picture, you get an enlarged view. Pretty obvious that this thing goes in a passive backplane.

    Time for bed...

    ---

  • It's a single-board computer that plugs into a passive backplane (bascially a bunch of ISA/PCI slots). The AGP bus is connected directly to On-board video so now AGP bus is broken out onto the connectors.

  • Excuse me, but.... (Score:5)

    by GoRK ( 10018 ) on Friday April 21, 2000 @05:15PM (#1117832) Homepage Journal
    This is a Single-Board Computer (SBC). They have been produced with dual-processor designs back to the days of the 486. They even have SBC's that can handle quad xeons. And there are a lot of these that are a helluva lot smaller than this one.

    They are absolutely NOT laptop tech. They require as much power consumption as a full system. They are designed to facilitate hardware upgrades with minimal downtime. (Swap the motherboard without removing peripheral cards; etc)

    Now, the question of a dual-processor laptop is a nice one to raise, but the power needs of let's say... two 300 mhz processors is WAY MORE than the requirements of ONE 600Mhz processor, so why bother? Maybe in the future, these new extremely low power cpu's will be put into mobiles in multiples, but until then; no.

    Honestly I can't even see why this item even made news. First, it's old tech. Secondly, it's WRONG, and thirdly the suggestions are totally off-base.

    Perhaps someone should have posted an "Ask Slashdot" for "Are dual-processor mobiles in our future?"

    ~GoRK
  • Dude, what you'd build with that particular part you found is a rack-mounted server.

    You know, the kind much larger than a laptop?
  • It's strange that most of this started coming at about the time the moderation system was implemented - I think someone has a grudge against that system and is actively producing some sort of campaign against it.

    I don't remember the trolls as being nearly as stupid before moderation. But the good news is that moderation puts them on the bottom of the list where they belong, so I rarely see them.

    D
    ----
  • I'm afraid I've always been too "straight" for that kind of game - I just don't find destructive behaviour interesting or useful.

    On the other hand, I'm so time crunched nowadays I don't think I'd have time for that sort of thing even if I loved it.

    D

    ----
  • Take a look here [picmg.org] for more info on PICMG if you're not familiar with it. It's basically a dumb ("passive") board containing a bunch of slots, with nearly all of the traditional "motherboard" logic moved to the daughtercard (which is what is being shown in this article). Neat concept, but more expensive than standard motherboards with no real benefits for home use.

  • Re:Could someone make a few clarifications (Score:4)

    by djschaap ( 11133 ) on Friday April 21, 2000 @05:25PM (#1117837) Homepage
    >Doe sthis mean if I have a newer system with 64 bit PCI slots I can slap this bad boy in...

    Absolutely not. This board is designed for passive backplane systems rather than the (much) more common motherboard-based PCs most of us are familiar with.

    A "passive backplane" is basically a motherboard with the chips removed -- a "passive" "backplane" of interconnected ISA/PCI slots -- nothing more. The funny thing is these passive backplanes cost more than many (most?) motherboards.

    Passive backplanes are typically used in industrial applications where cost isn't as important, or where the ability to do a complete "motherboard-equivilent" swap in the field without removing 2 dozen screws is important.

    In short, this isn't something that concerns the average /. reader. Sorry.

  • This reminds me... (Score:3)

    by Graymalkin ( 13732 ) on Friday April 21, 2000 @05:10PM (#1117838)
    of the PC cards you could stick in the older Macs for use running VirtualPC. This would be cool for a really big cluster in a single box. Using a backplane PCI bus (using the PCI 2.1 specs) would even allow a higher bandwidth between the boards than would a Beowolf cluster. The drawback to a bluster of these things is there would probably be little if any fault tolerance since they're on a parallel bus.
  • No one in there right mind would make a laptop with standard SDRAM (try SODIMMS instead) and full-size ide and floppy cables.

    Also, let's see how much battery life you get with two cellies chugging along in quake3.

  • Athlon (Score:1)

    by Fats ( 14870 )
    Cewl... *BUT*

    Why make a dual celeron mini board noone uses in stead of working on a way to get two Athlons working together???

    I want a dual Athlon 1Ghz!!!! :-)
  • Actually they usually give each cpu card it's own backplane. With a 3 slot PCI backplane you could add in the ethernet and SCSI needed for a server. If you lay the set on the side it will fit in a 1U case. You now have about 4/5th the volume of a 1U case for power supply, fans, floppy, harddisks, etc.
  • Checking things out a bit more I find a single P-II or P-III board that has Ethernet and SCSI built in [siliconrax-sliger.com], and a Single Pentium based Ethernet and SCSI that will take AMD K-6 CPUs [siliconrax-sliger.com]. With either you likely could squeze two servers into a 1U rack mount case. This would be great for redundant arrays of web page servers. In this configuration I see each server having a boot floppy, 2 HD, and it's own powersupply and fans.

    I've been looking at the costs associated with setting up a server farm for a web site. Ouch! Either you go with a 5U cases and get a cheeper servers but then pay tripple the rack costs, or use 1U servers and pay much more for the server, but lower your rack costs. In the long run the lower rack costs add up fast. I'm looking at a configuration of four rack servers, 1 Web, 1 DB, and 2 live backups then a keyboard/flat pannel display tray. All that will fit in a 5U space. In about 1 year I'll have paid for the higher costs of the 1U servers in saved rack costs alown. Using 5U high servers I'd have had to buy 5 slots to fit the same functionality in.

  • Too bad my 486 only has ISA slots...or otherwise I'd pop that thing in. Same goes for my Pentium 166 from Compaq (although there's 32-bit PCI vs. the 64-bit PCI that this dual-Celeron board seems to require)

    Actually that looks small enough to fit into a car somehow, poof! Instant set-top Internet using Linux. I can think of all kinds of uses now, maybe getting a ton of these and making a SETI or distributed.net cluster, although this might be a bit expensive to pull off.

  • how does this device connect to others? it said it was a fully compliant SBC board ? so can I slap 4 of these in a passive PCI backplane and interface them with each other? that would interesting if possible; for that matter can I put some in on a PCI backplane in a working system? I didn't see anything on the site... good questions though, because a 32 or 64bit backplane connection would really work pretty well for inter-server connectivity; ie. even basic 133MB x 8 = 1064Mbits/sec transfer rate. not too bad, eh?
  • >Yeah, they're cheap, but they still don't
    have the floating point. Why bother going to the effort?

    That's a bunch of crap. They have the same FPU
    as the PII/III (and Celeron II's have SSE!)
  • This is an SBC (Single Board Computer), some models of which you could run standalone but is usually plugged in to a passive bus.

    For a laptop, you want something like the Ampro Little Board/P5x [ampro.com] which uses the low power "Mobile Pentium" (Tillamook) processor, and has graphics and Ethernet along with everything else that's usually on a motherboard.

    Of course, if someone would start making a laptop case which can hold PC/104 cards and common LCD, power supply, and drives...then the laptop market would open up as the desktops did with standard cases and components.

  • Then there are heaps of places. Not all have dual CPU support but still. An article like this seem almost like advertisement. The board is really not that unique.

    So, to level that out, here's a few links:

    Dual Xeon board at http://www.mycomp-tmc.com/htm/xd6gx.htm [mycomp-tmc.com]

    This company has dual CPU's boards and other nifty _really_ small boards at http://www.nexcom.com.tw/ [nexcom.com.tw]

    Bunch of small boards at
    http://www.tme-inc.com/html/produ cts/prodinfo.htm [tme-inc.com]

    A _really_ small Pentium board at http://www.cts.com/browse/adlogic/msm p5s.html [cts.com]

    Well, that should give an idea and there's lots more out there.

    Breace.
  • I think that it's a great idea. Sure, laptops don't have to be the power equivalents of desktops, but why not have a few kickers at least? For some people (including myself), laptops have a certain aura that make them wanted, plus it's nice to know that you've got a full computer without having to keep up with all the pieces. So why not have a dual? I will admit it sounds yummy to me.


  • Save humanity by uploading a virus into an alien mothership whose computers are conveniently compatable with yours.


    Sorry, you can only do this with a Mac.

  • large scale embedded systems (Score:3)

    by tdrury ( 49462 ) on Friday April 21, 2000 @05:18PM (#1117850) Homepage
    These plug in CPU cards are popular is large-scale embedded systems. I used to design with these. Essentially you could take a passive ISA backplane with N slots and plug a CPU card in to drive the slots. 8 slots was typical, but we've had as many as 20. The problem with that many slots is impedance problems on the bus and cards not working because their slot isn't being driven properly.

    Another popular solution was a dual passive backplane. This was 2 sets of ISA slots that you could plug 2 CPU cards into. Then you could bridge them internally with custom hardware or externally with parallel/serial/ethernet/etc.

    I've been away from that work for a couple years now and with PCI, I don't know what is popular. PCI is a much different beast than ISA and you cannot just plop down PCI slots. As I recall, they actually used constructive interference on the bus (due to reflections at the ends with infinite impendance) to "build up" enough strength to drive the PCI card. Never designed any PCI stuff.

    Often these went into 6U 19" rack chassis with removable harddisks and such.

    -tim
  • Celeron floating-point works just fine -- just as well as the one in the P-II in fact, because it's the same oneas that in the P-II. Any performance differences are artifacts of different cache sizes and bus speeds.
    Tom's Hardware has a review [tomshardware.com] with benchmarks of a dual-celeron system. Dual Celrons actually outperform dial PIIs with 3D Studio Max (44 sec vs 46 sec).


  • I have been searching around for a small computer case without much luck. I am looking for something just large enough for a motherboard, cd-rom, and maybe a floppy drive. All I have been able to find is. Some of the mangled english on the contact and info pages is amusing. Anyone find anything similar.

    http://www.hansan.com/cabinet/cabinet.htm
  • You're mostly right except for the fact that the current Athlon is quite SPM capable. It has all the on-chip faccilities required for SPM. It's just that current Athlon chipsets, (The KX-133 and the AMD 750 Irongate) don't support SMP.
  • and have SMP disabled

    They are _meant_ to have SMP disabled ;-)

    as mentioned above, check out the Abit BP6 [abit-usa.com] for a dual Celery mobo - and more info at www.bp6.com [bp6.com].

  • 0 -55 C.

    My 400mhz dualies at 450mhz on a BP6 are doing 34c at 99% idle. They hit 48-9C after Quake 3 (non smp, i run win2k sans nvidia card).

    I'd love to see how they'd keep a box with a passive planar with 6 of these cards with 12 celerons at 500+mhz, or more cool.

    matt
  • What sort of board do you need to actually _use_ this thing? what does it plug into? does that daughter board allow for cards? Also.. it's video restrictions might keep it from really drivin a few markets. It supports AGP some how though, perhaps there is a way to connect a good video processor? 4mb video memory isnt going to play much of a game of UT _or_ let you walk through a house in realtime.
  • Unfortunately no-one can make a "dual" (read, smp) system with today's athlons, because the CHIP ITSELF does not have the capability to support smp yet. I guess theoretically you could build a board with two athlons on it, but they would each need their own seperate memories. I've heard of boards that let you run dual pentiums/celerys on a single chip board, but that's only possible because the chips already have the ability to do smp... the adapter makes up for the mobo's deficiency, I'm pretty sure it's nigh impossible to make a real SMP system with non-SMP chips.

    SMP stands for Symmetric-Multi-Processing, which is different from uniprocessing because there is more than one chip which needs to have access to the main memory. Because PC memories were designed for uniprocessing you need the SMP pseudo workaround, which comes down to the chips having a system for telling each other when NOT to access memory, because proc #N is currently using it. That's why you haven't seen any dual athlon boards yet, and why AMD is busting their collective butts to make an SMP *capable* chip.

    Btw, the symmetric part of SMP means that you're using exactly 2^n procs; It's possible to build a non symmetric system (i forget the term for it) but this is less efficient because the code to manage it gets really complex. Anyway can you think of a reason why you'd want exactly 3 or 5 chips on a board instead of 2 or 4 or 8? furthermore, when you get up there (over 4) procs in a box, performance goes south fast unless you invest massively in the bus, which means you're not even in personal computer territory anymore, and should start thinking about some kind of Alpha or Sun system....

    And as soon as they offer dual gigahertz athlons, I WON't buy it, unless they package it with some fancy new SuperDuper High Speed kind of RAM, because otherwise those suckers are gonna spend most of their time idling while they wait their turn to get data from RAM to cache.

    No siree, I'd buy a single sub-gigahertz Athlon, and slap a sick ultra160 scsi system in there instead.

    It's all about the I/O people.

    "A witty saying proves nothing." -Voltaire

  • I was wrong about Athlons not supporting SMP; as the other poster pointed out it's the kx133 and 750 which lack SMP capability.

    According to Toms Hardware [tomshardware.com], the 770 glue chipset will have support for 2 4 and 8 way SMP. Cool! I'd still rather spend the extra cash to pack that sucker with RAM and a fast scsi system though.... but then, I don't do anything extraordinary with my computer, just UT. Maybe if I ever got hardcore into rendering, but not today. thank you drive through.

    "A witty saying proves nothing." -Voltaire

  • This summer I'll be working as a research assistant for my University, setting up\securing\using a 6-node, Dual PII Beowulf cluster w/ Gigabit ethernet to do real-time chemical simulation. (Ok, I just HAD to tell people about that!)

    Now I'm thinking, using 6 of these sounds like it would take much less space and be faster. What do these boards connect into? Someone mentioned a PCI backpane, what are they? Also, IIRC, PCI64 is susposed to be faster than any existing ethernet, right?

    These board accept 144MB DiskOnChips, and up to 1GB of ram. Can we plug 5 of these with 500MHz Celerons into a backpane, put trimed-down linuxes onto the 144MB DOC, and have a killer Beowulf cluster?

  • The actual FPU is identical to a P2, and the x87 part is identical to P3 as well (but no SSE in Celeron 1).

    The FPU might benchmark as slower because of differences in cache configuration. The Athlon has a stronger FPU than any of the Intels, but the caches are slower.

    Anyway, when the poster you replied to talked about a slow FPU, he was probably comparing it to say an Alpha... *drool*

    dufke

    -
  • Just look... (Score:4) by Issue9mm

    I checked out their page, and was just as curious to find out what they were used for. I opened up the url to the main page, and it seems like they're aiming for the ISP / Rack-mount solution. (Note, they are a certified MS Solution provider... )

    Someone modded this up to +4 because Issue9mm can read?

    *sigh*

    I mean, I'm grateful that he saved me clicking a few links, but please...

    -jerdenn

  • Embedded Systems Device (Score:5)

    by rhedin ( 91503 ) on Friday April 21, 2000 @05:14PM (#1117862)

    These SBC (Single Board Computers) are generally used in embedded applications where standard form factor PC's won't work. Additionally, you get the ability to use main-stream/common development tools rather than more esoteric ones. Depending on your market, you can use DOS, Windows, or Linux combined with tried and true development tools such as Visual C++ or gcc. Definitely makes training & debugging much easier.

    I've used devices similar to build controllers for therapeutic water beds, various interfaces to hardware (non-computer, i.e. control surfaces on an aircraft, and the like).

    When you need them, they're very useful, although generally you're trading size for price. The last intel based device I used was about 5"x8", but the smallest was the ucSIMM Module [uclinux.com] running the Motorola 68EZ328 or the DIMM PC [jumptec.de] running an i486.

    When you pair up an intel based SBC with the solid state disks from M-Systems [diskonchip.com] that's when things start getting interesting.

  • It's a rack mounted sort of computer. You get these case which goes into the rack and they have this PCB inside with PCI and ISA slots and one or two slots for PC cards like those. Bascically you take these PC cards shove them into the PC card slots and then shove in the other stuff and off you go. The point of these things are to make it easier to get servers back online after a hardware failure. You don't have to unplug everything and then fiddle with the hardware. Just replace the part you want and get back to business.

  • Re:Dual Cel Laptop... (Score:3)

    by Issue9mm ( 97360 ) on Friday April 21, 2000 @05:05PM (#1117864)
    Unfortunately no, gaming is almost definately not the intended usage for this machine. As it currently stands, we're all aware of how poor 3D support is under Linux, and general game support is quite poor under NT.

    I've got a few friends claiming that things are better with Windows 2000, but that's almost beside the point here. Situation being as it is, the only GOOD gaming platform (excluding crashes and BSODs) is Win9x, which doesn't do SMP. This means no use of the second processor, which means that this board would be pretty pointless. Also, it wouldn't be the smartest idea to slap to celerons in for the point of gaming. Yeah, they're cheap, but they still don't have the floating point. Why bother going to the effort?

    Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with having a dual board sans 1 proc, but there's not much right about it either (except for the budget, usually). Anyway, you can almost certainly bet that this is designed with workstationing. Small profile == low footprint. Flat panel support == lower footprint. Dual celeron == budget machine. Pretty much what everyone in the corporate world is looking for. It seems rather a novel idea to put something with some actual horsepower (fpu excepted) for a cheap solid workstation, [NT|Linux|BSD] ready. It's a good idea, and deserves to make a lot of money.

    And (obligatory troll), can you imagine a beowulf cluster of these things?!?

  • Just look... (Score:4)

    by Issue9mm ( 97360 ) on Friday April 21, 2000 @05:11PM (#1117865)
    I checked out their page, and was just as curious to find out what they were used for. I opened up the url to the main page, and it seems like they're aiming for the ISP / Rack-mount solution. (Note, they are a certified MS Solution provider... )

    Just thought I'd point that out.
  • Hey not everyone Reads Design News. No but really allot of people have never herd of such devices because they simply arent common place in the mainstream feild. Which brings me to antother thing Todays compter nerds arent as savy as they used to be. years back you their were only two types of people Real Computer nerds who knew everything and then the dumb asses who knew shit. Todays typical computer nerd thinks he is a computer genius because he can install and config a linux box but doesent even have half a fuckin brain on how to build a computer from scratch! (I have come across several such people at my local 2600 meeting!) Well maybe im being blunt with my point but i hope someone understands that too many people only know the "mainstream" and not the whole wide world of computers. (case point: a so called computer expert I met in my computer engineering course didnt even know What a MIPS Processor is let alone what systems used them!) Oh and if this post seems irrelivent or doesent make sense its probably because im practically falling asleep here typing this so ignore the spelling etc...
  • Ok First off this mother board is ment to be mounted in a backplane chassis for industrial application such as motion control for CNC machines (but usually FANUC controlers are used) or robotics setups, as well as data aquisition. Look in the back of any Design News [designnews.com] magazine and youll see all of thoes cards that are supposed to be shoved into the backplanes. As far as being used in servers, they were never ment for such use. They are basicly for industrial embedded systems running QNX perhaps to run a machine shop or plant. Another thing that simply isnt possible to do with these bords it to issert them into other computers as an upgrade or put multiple cards in one unit for sort of super computer because youll just fry the card and computer. The card is a mother board and can you take the pci bus of one mother board and lets say pulg it directly into anothers? That would easily spell disaster. If you want to see other good industrial and embedded computers and solid state disks go here to Advantech [advantech.com.tw], they have a great line of sold state disks that range from 3.5" solid state IDE disks to a little 32MB solid disk that plugs right into the motherboards ide port and just sticks out about an inch from the connector. great for building embedded Linux, BeIA [be.com], or QNX [qnx.com] devices. Hey anyone here ever think of a pocket sized linux server check out this Advantech device [http] :) Holds 144MB flash cards for bootstrap has 10/100 ethernet, 32 MB ram and 4MB vga and ide in a 2.5 hdd form factor. Definaly some awesome linux potential as a micro server that can whoop ass!
  • I've been wondering, ever since they came out with the Celeron 300A and 333A, are the FPU benchmarks/real world results really that bad compared to the P-II or P-III? Every once in a while I hear someone criticize them, but...

    I seem to recall some benchmarks showing a perhaps 10% performance difference in FPU. Anyways, I'd be interested in seeing benchmarks of the Celerons VS P-II's, P-III's, and Athlons, to see just how much the performance/dollars hit is.

    End of rant... =P

  • I think one of their core selling points is that Win2000 has DirectX 7.0 built in... maybe I'm wrong though...must....fight....temptation...of Windows.....arrrgghhh!

  • It looked to me to be VLB (Vesa Local Bus). It came out after ISA and was/is faster than ISA. PCI came out shortly after (before? I'm not really sure) and there was a brief struggle before PCI won out. The advantage to VLB was that you could still use your old ISA stuff. I've only seen VLB slots on 486 motherboards. PCI was probably faster and now definately is. PCI is also smaller (shorter) and doesn't mean you have to have a long motherboard for the cards. I'm sure someone else could improve on what I've said here.

    Oh, and no, they are not VLB, they just look like it. They go in to some kind of passive board. Something like that. (Read earlier posts) But it would be cool if I could put a dual Celeron 500 board with 1 gig of RAM on my old 486 for compiling kernels on a RAM disk :). It would greatly improve compiling speed. Now, if they'd only make a 16-bit ISA version for my 386 SX.

  • This is the future! Checkout the smaller board size at the 'Infiniband TA' site - www.infinibandta.org and all that is missing is the high speed back plane adaptor and the Host Channel Adaptor (HCA). The Switched Fabric and the supporting companents are due to be available in the first Q of 2001 and this is the first board of comparitive size that has jet surfaced.
  • This [alagad.com] is a little image showing what I'm talking about. This strikes me a weird. Is this an interface for a daughter board as someone said eariler? What it looks like to me is that this was designed to somehow be mounted on another motherboard (or something).... But that strikes me a realy weird because of the location of the, er... connectors? (the word escapes me). Weird.

    The only thing I can find on this is "(32-bit PCI and 16-bit ISA) Support 4 master of PCI slot". Is that what these are? then why that little metal thing on that right that screws into a case?

    Any thoughts people?
  • It's for whatever you want it for, expensive frisbees if you really feel like it...

    Generally though, this type of product has many embedded applications. Manufacturing control, robotics, MRI machines, satellite tracking of delivery vehicles, amusement park rides... to name a few. Did you know that all the rides at Diseny World (and Euro-Diseny) are controlled by PC-based embedded computers?

    The applications for this might be a little on the high side for most embedded processing applications, although I could see a high-tech slot-machine making use of it. Other than that, I guess it depends on how bloated your code is...


    TangoChaz

    --------------------
  • Yes. That's the type of application SBCs are used for, beyond CTI and other such uses.
  • Just like there title this is what they are, They plug into a passive backplane most backplanes support two SBCs (single board computers) They also make half size cards that have two PIII or xeons. SBCs are a great way to go most have LCD support so you could make your I-opener this way. I am working on putting up a plan. You can also buy SBCs that do not need a backplane. This could be your car MP3 player either use a IDE hard drive or a flashcard to run the thing. After that you should be able to pick up a small LCD moniter with an optional touch screen kit from http://www.flat-panel.com/ These guys also offer LCD controler cards and moniter kits starting around $200. To hell with the I-opener make your own. For a list of manufactures look up single board computer on yahoo and you will get a list of about 30 manufactures. I perticularly interesting one is http://www.synergymicro.com They offer QUAD G4 boards as well as QUAD G3 boards which all run SMP linux.
  • I could see its use...games...have your friends bring their computers over to your house for a good old game of UT or Quake or summin. Or do some 3d renderiung on the fly...you could find summin.

    Who fragged me this time? Oh its that damn Blake guy...anyone know how to get past Blake on UT?
  • Ya know...I don't actually have a windows partition...hence the reason I only named Quake and UT. But I will say that with my glide drivers my Voodoo3 card works pretty damn spiffy. hey...and any game that has Tux on the back (check out the back of any UT box) is damn cool with me.

    Getting back to your M$ babble..I thought Win2k had no DirectX now and none planned in the future....But I am no Mindsweeper Champion and Solitaire Expert....so what do I know?
  • I'm sorry, I have to go off-topic here for a moment, and I don't give a fuck about karma. but here goes.

    I'm sorry, I really don't understand _why_ people come over here and say stuff like this. If these people think slashdot sucks, they can start slashdot-sucks.org and shove it up their own asses instead of makin' the people that like to use slashdot as a forum for discussing things that we're interested in, listen to it. Additonally, I'm a bit tired of people taking shots at rob and jon, and all the rest of the people that handle all the slashdot stuff, and no one cares if you want to give a "nice wet rim job to taco's mom." I don't even know what the hell that's supposed to mean!

    In conclusion, all the anonymous coward slashdot-haters (not the people that use slashdot and just like to keep their idents secret), just shove all the slashdot bashing up your ass and leave the people that like slashdot alone.

  • I'm pretty sure this was meant to hurt my feelings, but I couldn't stop laughing through this. seriously. hehehe
  • I'm sorry, why was I moderated down to zero, you could have given a reason.
  • I should probably point out that I am 15...and a slashdot reader, who the hell am I supposed to get pregnent? :P
  • What I wonder is, can you throw a powerleap [powerleap.com] Neo S370 adapter and have yourself a dual Pentium III system on it? Someone should look into that, it'd be very interesting.
  • sorry, powerleap [powerleap.com]
  • Any idea where I could get some boards that would fit this? I got some spare rack mount chassis that this thing would be perfect for.
  • Hmm, think about it before trolling.
    If the p120 takes less cooling then there is less of a panic when the fans (ah ha! A moving part) get clogged
  • What are you on about? Of course they consume physical material. Why do you think theres that stupid rule (forget the name) that says they half their size every 18 months - thats why theres a panic because in a few more years the chips would have to start splitting the atom to half in size.
  • It looks a though it will plug into a standard PCI/ISA passive backplane. This has a 32bit PCI and a 16bit ISA slot lined up.

    Each single board computer generally runs it's own copy of an OS. (This company seems to be biased towards NT). The backplane can then be used to talk to PCI cards these could be anything from DSPs to multi modem cards. These things generally find there way into industrial servers that have to have multiple redundant cpu boards etc.

    It would be possible for the computers to talk to each other using MPI over the PCI bus. Multiple boxes could then talk to each other using SCI to make a large MPI cluster.

    Scali http://www.scali.com make systems based on 4 way SMP boxes connected together with SCI.

    In practice Backplane systems tend to use higher performace proprietary designs such as Sun's "Gigaplane" I believe that someone makes a systems based upon backplane Ultrasparc systems connected by SCI. Now that would really rock. However it still wouldn't be any good for Unreal.

    Supercomputers are for compute intensive tasks that parallelize easily they don't have any benifit for texture maped games :)

    -dp
  • It is called PICMG. All it is is just ISA and PCI on one card. This board is ment to plug into a passive backplane (ie chipless) the I/O chipset is on this board. On a passive backplane you will see a number of PCI and ISA slots, along with one PICMG slot witch this plugs into, the back plane is wired so that the PCI and ISA busses get seperated.

  • Things to do with a dual-Celeron laptop (Score:5)

    by Green Monkey ( 152750 ) on Friday April 21, 2000 @05:17PM (#1117889)
    • Save humanity by uploading a virus into an alien mothership whose computers are conveniently compatable with yours.
    • Code the world's first no-click shopping script, which reads users' brainwaves to determine their desired purchases.
    • Take the initiative in creating the Internet.
    • Join Microsoft in its search for a way to divide large prime numbers.
    • Dual Celerons = double your chances of getting a first post on Slashdot!
  • Join Microsoft in its search for a way to divide large prime numbers.

    The solution (if the prime is congruent to 1 mod 4) is to simply divide it into complex divisors, then claim it's a solution.

    ---------------------------------

  • First post(from me to Slashdot)

    But anyways, have a system like this in a car, earphone jacks for each seat. Each person could listen to the music they want to.
  • Dual processors, a gigabyte
    of ram, sounds like a plugin to
    parse javascript while the
    mother board merely smokes.

    ^ ^ ^ ^ ^

    Just as laser surgery can
    improve your sight-
    a MICROWAVE LASER can
    blur it

  • Oh me Gawd I aiin't
    seen M I P S since C64 invaded
    Europe. Engineers probably still
    use c-64s as 'signal injectors'.
    What the hell it doesn't take
    a *GIPS* in order to type a few
    changes in a line of code.

    The reason why most nerds
    were so capable in yesteryear
    is because the machines were
    simpler. In order to do a
    project now ya need several
    experts in different areas
    just to keep up with the
    unnecessary coding changes.
    I can*wait* to see what
    XHTML. As of a decade
    ago the best and largest
    library of great freeware
    was C64...probably still
    is. While alot is out
    in Windows it doesn't
    begin to compare with
    the simplicity &
    usefullness of that
    old stuff. Win apps
    have to be written
    for the OS NOT THE USER!

    Linux isn't really
    supported except in server
    nodes, when your not
    recompiling your root.

    So... nobody understands
    backplane; one each type
    passive. Try saying
    x-pansion board... up neat.
    Your average tech can't do
    his card swapping thing
    without an expansion board.
    Where's my cryospray.

    When I was 14, I thought
    I thought my father a fool'
    When I was 40 I was
    amazed at how much he learned.

    ^ ^ ^ ^ ^

    One of the more remarkable aspects
    of dental caries is that the
    trauma to the cheek tissue is
    signifigantly greater than
    the turgor elaborated about the
    damaged roots in many patients.
    Sounds like radiation damage
    caused by a MICROWAVE LASER.

  • A rack mounted server is the obvious use... a more creative use is to build autonomous stinging robots to annoy your neighbors and house-guests!

    --// Hartsock //
  • I've been reading slashdot just barely long enough to remember there being no moderation. I used to post alot, then I stopped because I didn't get a whole lot of karma.

    Until recently I haven't done a lot of posting. My account was set to see only score:3 or better ranked comments and I would only read the top 3 comments. But that changed recently. I've pretty much figured out that you only get moderated up if you are in the first 50 posts or so, say something good, and if you have a positive karma, it probably influences the moderator.

    As for the guys gunning for negative karma. Negative karma is so much easier to come by rather than positive karma. The negative karma points can be gleaned on just about any new story that is still active. So, some posters are having fun raking up negative karma points.

    The resulting behaviours are similar to stuff I used to see way back when on the old BBS systems. Some guys play the good guy part to the hilt and strive to earn positive karma. Some guys wallow in thier negative karma, seeing themselves as 3l33t evil dudes... the negative karma gives status.

    So, slashdot has inadvertantly become a MUD-like environ (I don't really understand the new ones but I do remember things like them from my Trade Wars days where I was Commander Zarf not Zarf like you're thinking tho'). There were always the guys who prided themselves on getting as low an experiance and alignment as possible.

    Now the strange bit, often the guys who were the ones with 120 days play-time and 12 xp with a -1200 alignment were the same ones who where playing other characters who were on the top ten list. strange right? What I would watch some of these amazing players take one character say in position 3 and another in position 75 and swap their positions back and forth just by playing.

    I wouldn't be the least bit surprized to see 2 or 3 slashdot accounts that are really run by the same person. One with extremely high karma, one with extremely low karma. I wouldn't be surprized to see the two accounts flaming each other. I wouldn't even be surprized to see someone with a negative fifty karma fighting upto a positive fifty karma.

    Slashdot has become a mud due to karma. This is the danger of extending any system of reward and punishment that is synthetic to the real process at hand. It's not all bad, we just need to realize what is happening. now that I know how to play the game, you'll see a lot more posting from me, oh and by the way, I usually try to play the paladin role first.

    There are some ways slashdot could capitalize on it's new found role... I would like to see the ability to only view say... score 3 to 5... or see only score -1 to 0... that would be some what interesting wouldn't it? Theoretically all you would see is troll and insults in the range -1 to 0. In a strange space-moose sort of way it might be entertaining. I know there are some of us playing the evil troller role who would love this tool to help us rack up more negative karma.

    --// Hartsock //
  • Ok From reading the previous posts I gather then these hook up into a passive 64 bit pci bus. Doe sthis mean if I have a newer system with 64 bit PCI slots I can slap this bad boy in or do I need a special PCI board that dosen't have a proc thats made to slap these things into. I think a lot of slashdot readers who haven't played with servers are in the dark on this one so how bot enlightening us.
  • Else you really should get this out of your mind... AND A DUAL CPU labtop. Come on.. How much power do a labtop really need?
    Im really looking forward to the cruso based labz... theyll be nice.. And comsume, well.. a fraction of the power your dual 600 celeron would :o)



  • Lokks like you could plug multiple systems into the backplane.. Wonder how that would work out - they also have Pii/Piii dual mini-systems - you could plug 4 of em in there. ! If you could get it to work, 8 Piii's wouldn't be slow at all. b
  • i have several catalogs full of these lil SBC's .. with the necessary backplane boards they are for industrial applications such as factory controllers.... etc...
    they go in the control room and monitor all those important processes that it takes to make everything else this world seems to consume these days......
  • I just picked up the latest issue of PC Upgrade magazine at the newsstand for the cover story on building a mini PC. They used a Soyo LI-7000 case and mobo from Specialty Tech (www.specialtytech.com). The mobo has a socket 370 for a celeron and has a riser card for 1 half-length pci card. It has on-board audio, video w/TV-out, IrDA, and 10-100mbs ethernet as well as the usual serial, parallel, PS2 and USB ports. The case measures 14.3 x 12.4 x 3.3 in. It has a 150-watt PS, 1 internal 3.5 in. bay, and 1 ea. 3.5- and 5.25 in. external bays. The whole package costs $212. It's time for me to upgrade from my p-166 system - I'm giving this unit some serious consideration.
  • Thus far, the posts have described how SBCs are mostly *not* for a typical /. reader. Does anyone know what is the cheapest/most likely /. reader-level SBC company out there. One great use for these was already mentioned, but I must say again: Having a multinode cluster in a small apartment without taking over a room would be great!
  • I want that MB with the 16 card PCI backplane [siliconrax-sliger.com] plaese. Charge it!

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