Domain: totalimpact.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to totalimpact.com.
Comments · 37
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Re:More Importantly...
Erm, no. The G5 (from IBM) is power hungry. The G4 (from Motorola/Freescale) is not. The Mac mini has a 1.xGHz G4 in it and only needs one little fan, which is mostly for the Radeon graphics chip anyway. So you can put a G3/G4 in a CDROM-sized enclosure with 3.5" hard disk, or put 4 processors on a single PCI card.
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Re:More Importantly...
Erm, no. The G5 (from IBM) is power hungry. The G4 (from Motorola/Freescale) is not. The Mac mini has a 1.xGHz G4 in it and only needs one little fan, which is mostly for the Radeon graphics chip anyway. So you can put a G3/G4 in a CDROM-sized enclosure with 3.5" hard disk, or put 4 processors on a single PCI card.
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Re:pathetic attempt
The Mini wasn't even the first PowerPC machine in that small a form factor. The BriQ is a PowerPC system that is small enough to fit in a 5 1/4" drive bay. Only 800MHz, but still quite an interesting system.
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Re:goodbye bank account
Alternatively, you could maybe just upgrade to 512M, then get a 512M thumbdrive (or iPod Shuffle!) for much less than the additional $350 they want to go from 512M to 1G internal. Set it up as RAM drive and you might be able to get some of the speed of full Gig of internal RAM for $200 less.
Not likely. You do realise that flash memory is pretty damn slow? And it has a limited lifetime, something like only 10k-100k erase cycles? You certainly wouldn't want to swap to it.
But clustering these things certainly sounds interesting, at least in small numbers. Especially considering the alternatives, like the briq. Put 6 or 7 mini's on an 8-port ethernet switch and you're only out $3.5K, tops. Stack them on top of each other and they'd still take up less space than a normal PC case. They're not overly powerful processors nowadays, but they're nothing to sneeze at. And if you're working on an easily parallelizable algorithm, e.g rendering, then you're laughing! I think we'll see a lot of small mini clusters on slashdot in the neat future.
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Re:Missing feature
Sorry, dude. I wasn't trying to be condescending but I just don't think that's a) the best use of a Mini and b) Apple's idea of its use. I don't think it will happen--though there are USB/Ethernet adapters that might help you have your router afterall! (Just don't tell Steve!)
The BriQ" might be a better choice for this application. They list for $1400 but I bet you can find 'em on eBay for the price of a new Mini. There's also some other small, cheap, and quiet x86 boxes out there for about the same price. -
Re:Market, Workload, and _Patents_.
Build a card from existing chips.
Indeed, one of the comments on the KernelTrap story suggests putting four G4's on a card (like this) and doing everything in software. You get serious performance with Altivec and low power consumption, even with four CPUs. Still a patent minefield though.
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Component Failure
I've owned about 7 mini-ITX boxes, and 3 of them have had motherboard flaws when I unpacked them (2 had bad network ports, and one had no USB). Another one worked for a month or so before the network port went bad. Still another only boots about 2 out of every three times I push the power button on. I end up having to use the one PCI slot for an extra network card just to get the network to work. Has anyone else experienced issues like this?
I am not one to give up easily on something like this. The form factor and lower power consumption of these boards is very cool. But I've given up on Via's EPIA and EPIA-M.
Instead of the EPIA platform, I'm now deploying servers based on the Total Impact BriQ. And I'm much happier. I didn't need Firewire, USB (except for keyboard, and the BriQ has a serial port instead), or fancy graphics (BriQ has none, unless you count the VFD, heh). But they make slick servers.
And they run Debian/PPC nicely, but you have to use a network install to get it software on there.
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Not even a 2nd place. The briq came before.
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Briq == expensive
They are kinda expensive though:
http://www.totalimpact.com/briQ.html
briQ w/PowerPC 750FX 800MHz, 512MB SDRAM, 20GB HDD - $1,399
briQ w/PowerPC G4 (7400) 500MHz, 512MB SDRAM, 20GB HDD - $1,499 -
Good news, but not great news.
The BriQ http://www.totalimpact.com has been able to run MacOS via MOL for ever so long, so this is in fact not great news itself. Question is: Why do so? Neither machines were intended for this purpose.
However it is nice to see companies supply motherboards based on the PPC processor because of the lower powerconsumption. More Power less Heat. -
More usefulness...
Several months ago there was an article on
/. about the BriQ, a powerful Linux/PowerPC box squeezed into the size of a CDROM drive. The only connectivity of the unit is an ethernet jack, a serial port, and the front panel. A couple weeks ago I was given a project at work to develop a menu system/UI that would run on the front panel of a BriQ to be used as a demonstration unit. The BriQ's front panel consists of a 20x2 VFD display, a tri-color (red, green, yellow) LED, and 2 buttons.Control of the panel is simple: writing to
/dev/lcd displays characters on the VFD (or changes the LED color w/ control characters), and reading from /dev/lcd gets the state of the buttons. I was able to develop a UI (in Perl) that used those buttons and the display to not only display status messages, but perform basic system tasks like rebooting and setting manual network configuration settings.Unfortunately none of the displays that I've seen online have included anything in the way of input on the same serial connection, which would increase the usefulness of these status displays immensely. C'mon, don't tell me X (especially w/ proprietary drivers like nVidia or Matrox) has never frozen on you, leaving you to find some other machine to ssh in from and fix things. With a simple secondary I/O system like the one on the BriQ, one could not only have a really cool gadget, but also provide a needed backup interface for those computers that do double-duty as workstations and servers. Or even to get monitorless servers started up on strange networks w/out DHCP.
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Re:Impractical
don't see these things taking off for most uses because the PCI bus is limited to a measly 133 MB/S. Even newer 64 bit PCI slots found in some servers have insignifigant bandwidth to keep the data flowing fast enough to make full use of these things.
You've heard of Beowolf clusters, right?
Let's imagine I'm running some large routine to model some physical phenomena.. Depending on the problem, it is often possible to split the computational domain into small chunks and then pass only the elements along the interfaces between nodes.. So, how does that impact this discussion? Well, let's assume I can break up an NxM grid onto four subdomains. The communication from each node will consist of N+M elements (not NxM).. Now, let's take a look at our options. I can either purchase 4 machines with gigabit (~1000Mb/s) ethernet, Myranet (~200Mb/s) cards, or maybe I can use ip-over-firewire (~400Mb/s) to communicate between machines.. Gigabit ethernet has some latency problems that are answered by Myranet, but if we just look at the bandwidth issue, then ~1000Mb/s is roughly 125MB/s. That's slower than the 133MB/s you quoted above for a 32bit, 33MHz PCI bus.. Of course there are motherboards out there that support 64bit, 66MHz PCI cards (such as these from TotalImpact)..
You're right that the PCI bus is not as fast as the data io approaches use by IBM, Sun, SGI, etc to feed their processors. BUT, if I'm deciding between one machine sitting in the corner crunching numbers, or 4 machines sitting in the corner talking slowly to each other through an expensive gigabit ethernet switch, guess which system I'm going to look at?
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Re:YellowDogLinux G4 Cluster
You can buy the BriQ's from Total Impact, but they're not cheap as you pointed out.
I'm glad to see that TerraSoft is working with TotalImpact. They were selling rack mounted clusters comprised of g3's ripped from iMacs.. This is definitely a step in the right direction!
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Re:Too bad it will be in $4000 computers
Don't you worry your pretty little head
Buy a Briq or Centricity instead
Total Impact -
Re:yeah, but what about the BriQs?errr...sorry, but Terrasoft is only a reseller of the briQ's. other than selling them, and giving them the stylish Yellow Dog look, they don't have much to do with the briQ. if Apple, for whatever reason, decided to invest in a company that competes with them not only on the OS front, but also on the hardware side(the honeypot)...I would hope that they would invest in the actual OEM, rather than one of their retail channels.
Total Impact is the OEM, BTW.
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Re:Yawn!
This is about the closest I've seen to a multi-G4 machine: www.totalimpact.com. They have 4 and 8 node G4 clusters. Each CPU node is smaller than Apple's Cube, and the 8 node cluster (expensive at $28k) weighs in at a mere 22lbs..
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More than just the briQ thing
Total Impact also seems to have these daughter cards that drop into an intel PCI system. With up to 4 powerpc CPUs on a card, and multiple cards per system!!
You could keep your intel workstation, and still run powerpc applications ... Might be an interesting environment to adapt something like MOSIX to. (Load balance between multiple cards in the same system, etc.)
In any case, this could allow for a LOT of CPU power in one box. Neat product.
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Linux is as threatened by OS X as...
...I can't think of what.
On PowerPC, Linux isn't "threatened" by OS X. Look at the vast array of devices running Linux/PPC. There's the TiVo, Total Imact's briQ, and Apple machines ranging from the Power Mac 7200 (PowerPC 601 @ 75 MHz) to the PowerBook G4 (PPC 7410 @ 400/500 MHz).
OS X is targeted at very specific audiences, most of whom are different than Linux's audience. You can't run OS X on a TiVo. It might be made to run on the briQ (somehow). And you can't run it on any Apple machine prior to the Power Mac G3.
If OS X was released for Intel, it'd find a home (possibly a small home), but it wouldn't totally annihilate Linux. It also won't do that on PowerPC.
People aren't looking at what OS X could do for LinuxPPC. Instead, they're obsessing over what it may do to Linux. And that is not what we should be obsessing over.
Haaz: Co-founder, LinuxPPC Inc., making Linux for PowerPC since 1996. -
Not that new...and what are they going to patent?I mean...OrangeMicro made an Intel-box-on-a-PCI for quite a while (OK, minus the 10/100 and the 40GB HD). Apple even distributed a machine that had that sort of card in it. They just jammed the HD and ethernet onto it too...and did it with G3/4 chips... The graphic here says 'Patent Pending'...what would they have to offer so 'insanely great' that they would patent this? Stuffing LinuxPPC into a lunch box? I mean...I'd love to have one...I just don't see patentability...does anyone else? (not intended as a troll)
Galego
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Re:They're for real - check these benchmarks
woops. mPower again
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They're for real - check these benchmarks
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REAL SETI accelerators
Hey, didn't
/. post a story about REAL SETI accelerators a while back?
Of course, they can be used for accelerating OTHER things too... like the distributed.net client! =P -
This sounds very familiar...
Well, not THAT familiar, but someone used a similar concept (processors on a PCI board) here. I believe this was posted on Slashdot a few weeks ago.
Anyway, this card is a LOT cheaper.
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Several good reasons...
- Linux isn't yet, by itself, a good enough reason for the existence of a laptop product.
- Unless you can get economies of scale from selling lots of 'em, the problem of low volume will result in high prices.
- No WordPerfect, and limited maturity of web browsers.
I'm still watching for the first release of OpenPPC hardware; it too is not expected to be inexpensive. TotalImpact cards sound rather cool, but are apparently expensive enough that the vendor isn't willing indicate any pricing information on their web site; reportedly about $1K per CPU.
The "pricing structure" behind the PPCs just doesn't seem suited to laptop deployment that occurs "because they're low powered."
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You are full of nonsenseSignal 11, please.
You have crossed the line from foolishness to fraud. You have realized that you are wrong, and will now spew out any lie to save face.
You want links?
Here is one 450W consumer power supply and This place also sells one. 450Watts too much? How about 400, which you can also buy HERE or HERE . That last one has a really great description/specifications page, but you have proven you aren't interested in reading things like that. You didn't really beleive your 300Watt power supply was the best on the market, did you?
Sure, I guess you'd know the difference between a DIMM slot made for cpu cache vs. main memory. I don't know anything about macintosh hardware, for all I know those dimms were there for caching accesses to main memory.
Your whole point is compeletly irrelevent because had you actualy READ the page (which is the issue of this thread) you would CLEARLY see in the specifications that the board has "Two 168 DIMM sites, support for up to 512Mb of SDRAM, 3.3V, unbuffered PC-100 DIMMS.". It is right there in plain english. Those two 'slots' that you cannot seem to identify ARE PC100 168pin dimm slots. You may as well argue that they might be new slots for a secret mac chip not yet revealed, you would be just as wrong either way.
Practice what you preach.
I DO practice what I preach, I READ articles before I post about them.
I suggest you stop now before you totaly disgrace and completely discredit yourself.
NightHawk
Tyranny =Gov. choosing how much power to give the People.
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Re:Understanding what this means
If you look at RC5 Benchmarks it lists bench marks for their 604e boards. So it can do it. It is just a matter of how fast the G3/G4's are going to be on it. Then again who is going to spend this much money for just RC5. If you do have money like this to burn send it my way.
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President of Total Impact talks about future plansBrad Nizdil of Total Impact has lurked on the OpenPPC Project's mailing list for months, and just posted a message about the company's plans regarding the PowerPC Open Platform. Interesting stuff.
POP is IBM's PPC-based reference platform, which will (we hope!) allow OEMs to build inexpensive and clever PPC-based applications. Design files for the first version of POP never came out due to a bad part (the Northbridge, from Winbond); according to Brad, a "POP2" is on its way.
As always, further info is at http://www.openppc.org.
--Tom Geller
Co-founder, The OpenPPC Project -
My god!How does signal 11 get moderated up for this crap? He didn't even read the article!
Right HERE it CLEARLY shows two dimms on this board, and that pic is on the TOP of the page!!
Also if you scroll down to the discription you will see:
Memory: Two 168 DIMM sites, support for up to 512Mb of SDRAM, 3.3V, unbuffered PC-100 DIMMS.
Not only this, but then he speculates this will over drain power supplys! Since when do massive datacrunching servers with raid setups have mere 300W non redundant powersupplys? And how often are large raid setups powerd by their host computer? On the discription page it also clearly states:
Minimum 30W (processor speed and SDRAM size dependent) 5V 12-18A, 12V .5A Integrated power supplies: 3.3V and VCore are generated on-board, power is drawn from host system power supply.
If signal 11 had actualy READ the article before posting he would have acquired this information and maybe even said something useful.
Thank you for being so informative/insightful/interesting Signal 11!
NightHawk
Tyranny =Gov. choosing how much power to give the People.
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But wait, there's more...
Looks like they are working on a Linux-specific product too...
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Re:Cheap PowerPC machines?
Look for an older Mac from a used hardware resller or an auction house (i.e. eBay). If you decide to pick up a Mac make sure it's a PPC box with a PCI bus.. The 6100's, and a couple other models, use nubus rather than PCI which will force you to use MkLinux.
There are other PowerPC machines either available or under development. Check out this link for a few of the POP efforts out there...
Personally, I've been looking at the quad 604e/G3/G4 PCI cards from Total Impact for a while now. They're expensive! However, they aren't single board computers. They sit in a PCI slot in your Mac/PC and act as additional processors. Total Impact announced a LinuxPPC based server box (they don't have much info on their site about it) using up to 13 internal G4 processors and scalable using an additional backplane... -
Re:Cheap PowerPC machines?
Look for an older Mac from a used hardware resller or an auction house (i.e. eBay). If you decide to pick up a Mac make sure it's a PPC box with a PCI bus.. The 6100's, and a couple other models, use nubus rather than PCI which will force you to use MkLinux.
There are other PowerPC machines either available or under development. Check out this link for a few of the POP efforts out there...
Personally, I've been looking at the quad 604e/G3/G4 PCI cards from Total Impact for a while now. They're expensive! However, they aren't single board computers. They sit in a PCI slot in your Mac/PC and act as additional processors. Total Impact announced a LinuxPPC based server box (they don't have much info on their site about it) using up to 13 internal G4 processors and scalable using an additional backplane... -
Re:Here's SOMETHING to run it on
This stuff is somewhat expensive, but if you're looking for a PPC box made by someone other than Apple and capable of running LinuxPPC take a look at: Total Impact mPower systems
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Re:Linux on PowerPC, PowerPC upgradability
TotalImpact has 128 G3s running on a passive backplane under MacOS.
They're planning MP Linux systems with 5-13 G4s based on IBM's PowerPC Open Platform.. -
Apple's contribution
There's a lot of anti-Apple spewage going on about the G4, and that's understandable, given the audience. Give Apple credit for helping bring the chip to market, however. Without them, Motorola might've dropped it, and then you wouldn't have the possibility of an AltiVec-enhanced G4 PowerPC Open Platform box running LinuxPPC, and cracking what can only be described as a buttload of keys for the Slashdot RC5 team.
On top of that, companies like Total Impact can now bring to market open platform multiprocessor G4 systems that will likely be really screamin' fast.
Forget iMac - now *that's* yummy.
-Zebe -
Why 5.FIVE cpus? Not 4, 8 or even 6? Huh
This is just a guess, but it looks like the main thing they make is a 4 CPU PCI expansion board. So, if you have a single CPU mac with a PCI bus and you add one card you have 1 + 4 cpus. This also makes sense as they say at one place in their page that you can have 13 CPUs (1 + 3*4).
Here is a pic from their page which lead me to this assumption.
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Re:complete vaporware
They have something shipping. It's an external PCI-based "PowerBox" that you load up with their CPU cards. I've heard of these guys before. The seem to do some crazy hardware hacking.
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How about a 40 G3 processor box
Bet that's got more horsepower than your dual PII. Or if that's too much money, they 1,2,4 G3 processor boards for less money. Total Impact