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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Actually I am wrong. The briq from was running MacOS a year ago or earlier.

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

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.

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.

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?

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!

Don't you worry your pretty little head
Buy a Briq or Centricity instead

Total Impact

Total Impact is the OEM, BTW.

Terra Soft Partners page

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..

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.

...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.

Galego

woops. mPower again

You might inquire on OpenPPC

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

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.

• 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."

Tyranny =Gov. choosing how much power to give the People.

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.

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

Tyranny =Gov. choosing how much power to give the People.

Looks like they are working on a Linux-specific product too...

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...

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...

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

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..

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

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.

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.

--

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