Slashdot Mirror
Mini Dual-Celeron Board
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?"
Are they perhaps going after high density markets, such as rackmount servers and clusters? Just my initial thought on it.
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?
>Doe sthis mean if I have a newer system with 64 bit PCI slots I can slap this bad boy in...
/. reader. Sorry.
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
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.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
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
This company has dual CPU's boards and other nifty _really_ small boards at http://www.nexcom.com.tw/
Bunch of small boards at
http://www.tme-inc.com/html/produ cts/prodinfo.htm
A _really_ small Pentium board at http://www.cts.com/browse/adlogic/msm p5s.html
Well, that should give an idea and there's lots more out there.
Breace.
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
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 running the Motorola 68EZ328 or the DIMM PC running an i486.
When you pair up an intel based SBC with the solid state disks from M-Systems that's when things start getting interesting.
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?!?
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.
Green Monkey