Slashdot Mirror
Multiprocessor G3/G4 Boards
giminy writes: "These boards from TotalImpact look pretty nifty. Each one can take 4 g3's or 4 g4's and go in a regular PCI slot -- and get this, they can run in Intel machines. They work by having a program dumped to them like a second computer. Still kinda pricey for the cards, but you can put as many of these cards in your server as you want for something super-scalable. Linux support is there, and datasheets are available." We mentioned these back in '98 but a lot has changed since then. I'm sure there are clever uses for a couple of spare CPUs in a box ;)
They're more like "Computing peripherals" - They're PCI cards that fit in any PCI slot. (Well, one conforming to the right specs - One of their 66 MHz/64-bit PCI cards won't work in your average box.)
They cards will not run standalone or as a primary processor, they're slave processors. You still need a host processor, which can be whatever you want. (Intel, SPARC, Alpha, PPC, even StrongARM probably.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
If you need to constantly go over the PCI bus for everything (memory, disk, etc) then yes, you'll run out of bandwidth real quick.
However, the board appears to have a lot onboard, meaning that the bandwidth requirements are lower, leaving you with things like a "black box" scenario. You have an image you need manipulated, so you send it to the G4 board with the manipulation instructions. The board gnaws on it for a while without working on the PCI bus, then returns the modified image.
-- Ever notice that fast-burning fuse looks exactly the same as slow-burning fuse? I didn't... (Edgar Montrose)
but not your favorate closed-source variety
why the hell would you say something liked that? it's just plain stupid. In case you've been absent the past 15 years, hardware support is almost always more complete with 'closed source' OS's than OSSOS's. man, please don't be such an idiot. Windows supports more pieces of hardware than there are competent linux operators!
:)Fudboy
:)Fudboy
I guess I'm only a Fudboy, looking for that real Transmeta
Looks like you beat me to the obligatory distributed.net comment.
Friends don't let friends use multiple inheritance.
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.
the low FPU based needs of a server,
How true is this ? If you're a disk-only server, or even a SQL box, then you need disk bandwidth, memory, disk space and network bandwidth in roughly that order. OTOH, if you're bothering to put extra processor boards into your server at all, you're presumably needing to crunch serious numbers. How much of a margin is there between needing an essential FPU and not needing extra processors at all ?
I'm getting into packaging media for streaming servers. A bucketload of G4s in a box sounds like a fine idea to me.
whoah, that came off kinda harsh! Sorry, I just get so excited by motherboards...
I should mention that, yeah, I would like more irq as well. Another thing - multiplexing at that scale is probably feasable, a function of the MB chipset... the chipset mfctr.s could provide for this if there were a profitable reason.
:)Fudboy
:)Fudboy
I guess I'm only a Fudboy, looking for that real Transmeta
I think it's only available for the *500 series PowerMacs at this point. I'll sell you my 8500 if you're really interested :)
just my blog and pix
Friends don't let friends use multiple inheritance.
I may be mistaken, but the marketing info makes this seem like Asymmetric Multi-Processing. I thought that had pretty much fallen into disfavor. It just can't match SMP in most cases.
from the 9600/350 spec sheet:
Data Path: 64-bit, 100 MHz
Slots: 6 PCI
Notes: One PCI slot occupied by video card. System supports 100 MHz cache bus, and 50 MHz system bus speeds.
from the 9600/200MP spec sheet:
64-bit, 50 MHz
6 PCI
from somewhere else on the Apple, re the 9600, I forgot to copy the link:
Six PCI expansion slots compatible with PCI 2.0-compliant cards
does that provide any info? I don't know what PCI 2.0 implies, exactly...
What is the robbing of a bank, compared to the founding of a bank? -- Bertolt Brecht
Supposedly quad g3/400's are $4500, quad g4/400's are ~$6500. Yeah, it's kind of pricey, but if you stick 8 of these things in a box, you have some serious computational power.....
The Right Reverend K. Reid Wightman,
drool...
What is the robbing of a bank, compared to the founding of a bank? -- Bertolt Brecht
I'm pretty sure the design of the AGP bus allows only one AGP interface per system bus (eg CPU/Memory/AGP shared bus)
funny munging
Ok, this is kinda cool, you can put lots of processor power in one box. Of course you probably will have a bottleneck at the bus so it won't actually be that fast a lot of stuff. The real question is what the hell am I going to run on it?
I mean its mac chips which will most likely go into PCs. No software that's straight off the shelf will run on this thing because its too freaking wierd. Definitely not windows (but so what) and most likely not MacOS either (ditto). However I'm betting you can't just throw Mandrake on this either and get it to work. This company is going to put out a custom linux distro just so they can get some practical use out of the concept.
I mean if you're not going to be using Open Source software with this thing you may very well be up the proverbial creek. Thats not a problem for many slashdotters, but if I want to run a commercial analysis package that available in binary only, this architecture is probably right out.
So far I've gotten all my Karma from telling people they are wrong... :)
I'm not sure everyone would have sue for this, but a pci card that used the bus for little (if anything) more than power and a fast lan connection. Plug a p3+ram+video+?sound card into a pci slot, plug in a keyboard, mouse, monitor, maybe speakers, and you've got a dual (or more) mobo case. You could either mount a filesystem from the "host" mobo, or toss an IDE connection on the baord as well. Sound too small to be true? The EspressoPC did it, and while it would obviously have some nasty power requirements, and while it wouldn't be for everyone, it would have a wide number of potential uses:
A few years back, this company called Ross Technologies (recently defunct) sold a product called the SparcPlug, which fit a Sparc/Solaris workstation in a PC's spare 5.25" drive bay, allowing you to run NT and Solaris simultaneously. It had it's own ethernet, but used the PC's keyboard, mouse, monitor, drives, etc., and was sold bundled with a Dell Pentium for around $10k. I don't know if anybody made an actual x86-compatible pc-on-a-card for a PC, though...
I even heard about developments of PCI boards consisting of 32 StrongARM CPU.
Given a 1MIPS/Hz performance, just imagine yourself with a virtual 5-6GHz per board!
ARM are also known for having the best puissance/consummation ratio.
They indeed hardly burn even a single Watt each.
--
Trolling using another account since 2005.
If you also got a G3/G4 upgrade card, you ought to even be able to custom compile the programs to take full advantage of the newer processors...
What is the robbing of a bank, compared to the founding of a bank? -- Bertolt Brecht
As was mentioned before, DayStar had dual and quad 604 machines out a while ago. Apple produced the 8500/180 and 200 with dual 604s. Also, IIRC, the original BeBoxen were dual 603 machines...
However, I'm not sure that any of these were truly "on the board" and not on processor daughtercards.
just my blog and pix
What about the larger x86 servers from Unisys and Sequent which have DOZENS of PCI slots?
G4 500's are rated at around a GLFOP. So about 4 GFLOP per PCI slot? Some servers have like 32, 96, 100+ 64-bit 66MHz PCI slots... there's a thought. Heh.
--
PCI beats Ethernet any day, but most scientific clusters use Mirinet or SCI, which are about 1 Gbps full duplex, while PCI is about 4Gbps half-duplex with a 64bit/66MHz bus. This means that as soon as you have two of those babies in your computer, your PCI bus is actually slower than is you had a switched Mirinet or SCI interconnect.
The other problem is the bus on the card is too slow to handle four CPUs. Our experience is that anything over two CPU in a single machines will cause bottlenecks. Except on SGIs with ccNUMA, of course, which can handle eight CPU per machine easily.
Memory is also a bit tight - we usually need use about 512Mb per CPU, this thing as 512 for all 4 CPUs.
Well, that's my NSHO and experience.
Here's Motorola's G4 fact sheet. The real lowdown on the G4 is here. Especially check out the hardware spec. (The link seems to be broken or something, though. I looked at it a few weeks ago :(
:( G4s support a range of clock divisors for the external L2 cache SRAMs, from 1:1 to 4:1. Apple uses 2:1 in their towers. (BTW, the cache RAM is external, but the control logic and stuff is all on chip.)
The TotalImpact page doesn't say what speed they run the L2 cache at. (The PDF spec sheet link is broken
#define X(x,y) x##y
#define X(x,y) x##y
Peter Cordes ; e-mail: X(peter@cordes ,
A fair number of i840 boards have them too, shame you need RIMMs though, but if you can afford one of these boards you can probably afford the RIMMS.
If a G4 dissipates 10W, then a 4 CPU board will dissipate 40W. 8 of them will dissipate 320W. Okay only a problem forpeople with more CPU's than sense.
The more I think about it, the more I like it. It sounds exactly as powerful as a SMP machine BUT you can add more CPUs more easily. Up to 8 cards each with 4 processors plus my main processor is 33 CPUs! In one machine! And you can more than 8 cards if you don't "map all the memory" (according to the page).
How much??
--
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
I think the software would have to be very specialised to use the board as by the sounds of things the program needs to be written specifically to use this board and not just be threaded.
The Tyan board i mentioned is indeed i840,
but looking at the spec, uses pc100 dimms.
Glad to see we're not entirely forced into
Rambus. You're right though, for a $600
board, rimms would be much less of an issue.
-Tannin Kal
Looks like they are working on a Linux-specific product too...
From the companies' web page it looks like they are powered with MPI, not PVM, not a thread model.
I'd be very intersted in how much of MPI and MPI-2 they support...
What would be intersting is having a number of these cards connected togeteher in the same machine, using MPI for on-card communication, and then some sort of IMPI or some other protcol for communcation to other cards (or other machines)
Who am I? Subscribe and find out
So, as Linux/Apache webservers aren't all that uncommon, how about running SQL-server on one card and application server on another? All the machine is left to handle on main CPU(s) is Apache that queues processes for the cards and tosses results back to the HTTP pipe.
Heh, my Lisa MB has a CPU slot. Talk about running ahead of the pack.
How's this for a configuration? If you look at the specs on these boards, they allow daughter boards too. The daughter boards include SCSI, 10/100BaseT Ethernet, and IEEE1394. Mainframe Architectures off load I/O from the CPU to a large extent. Suppose we use these in a system like that... Use the PPC board with Ethernet, one on either end, you have the beginnings of a highly secure network card (can you say 1024+ bit keys?). Offload the SCSI, letting the PPC board pick up the I/O control, manipulating the data. Using the Ethernet daughtercard, you can monitor the network traffic, basically building the firewall directly into the NIC at that point. The possibilities for these critters go on.
Then there's the Beowulf - Talk about HUGE... 4 way processor host machine, with 8 of these PPC cards fully loaded, then put these into the Beowulf cluster. Multi-level parallel systems - now you're talking super-computing at a level never seen before!
Then there's the ultimate use... Take a system like this, 4 way processor with these cards, using the cards as multimedia, network, and other I/O sub-processors, and you're talking an incredible gaming box...
Uhh, no. AGP is another bus on the system. It's basically a high speed memory bus, and while it is optimised for one way, processor -> agp transfers, that by no means limits its use to video cards. I could see where it'd be useful to say, dump a chunk of encrypted data straight into a piece of shared memory for the processor card to sit there and chew on, or maybe dump a raw stream of audio through for the processor card to encode to a format such as real audio, leaving the PCI bus free for the task of actually shipping that stream out to clients.
Just because it's mostly used for video cards now, doesn't mean that video cards are the only thing AGP is good for.
When I was able to do my own spam-armoring, you got a chance to email me. Now you can only hope I see your reply.
Speaking of TV shows, do you Ameri-Co users get to see "The Games", a hilarious insight into the fiasco that is the Sydney Olympics management. The show's premise is a cameraman who follows the head management team around, looking into meetings, etc etc.
http://www.abc.net.au/thegames/
One scene, the head guy is pep-talking in a staff meeting, and couldn't read his own handwriting.
"... and our love of... what's that word?"
"Sport."
"Aaah thanks. Heh, I can't read my own... what's that word?"
"Writing."
"Can't read my own writing. That's it. Anyway..."
--
Computers are useless: they can only give you answers. -- Pablo Picasso
At the recent SMP meeting about FreeBSD held at Yahoo, there were 3 people there from Apple Computer. Feel free to speculate.
-bugg
I used to use a 386 with an array of 16 T800 transputers to render. Each board of 4 transputers had 4 megs of RAM, as well as one meg for each transputer as cache. They communicated along a dedicated back bus.
This was used for RenderMan rendering with the old Digital Arts DGS system. The main processor would split the job into 16 x 16 pixel "buckets" and send the pre-clipped scene data (geometry, lighting, surface information) as well as the a portion of the textures used in the scene. As each transputer finished the contents of it's bucket, it would dump it back along the ISA bus to the Targa framebuffer.
Thats the sort of process these are useful for. Not SMP, but assisted special-purpose processing.
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
I can see some potential problems with using these in normal systems. Even if you have a 66Mhz 64bit PCI slot, I think you'll have problems with power consumption especially if you have 2 or more processors. I believe that a PCI card can only draw about 20W according to spec. However, one of these cards with two processors will need to draw at least 14-20W for the processor alone. I didn't see any information about a separate power supply like the Voodoo 6000 so I assume that you'll need a special PCI slot that can supply the power or need to attach the card to a power cable.
"When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes. When you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it
A Beowulf Cluster of these?
Ask the people at Be. The original BeBox used dual 603s and SMPd like nobody's business.
just my blog and pix
Mostly used for video cards?
AFAIK, AGP is only used for video cards at this point. I'm not sure why, but if they don't use it for anything else, there must be a reason that you and I haven't concidered. Yes, I agree AGP sounds like it would be a good idea to use here, but who knows. Further discussion is next to useless becasue we do not know the relevant information.
PS: AGP was meant for video. Advanced Graphics Port.
There comes a time in every man's life when he must say, "No mother! I do not want any more Jell-O!"
...which might not be that bad of an idea for server-only uses. IMHO, of course.
Washington, DC: It's like Hollywood for ugly people.
Yes, this is new. This is not the main CPU of a system that just happens to be connected in a package resembling a "card" as you put it. This is a PCI expansion device ("card") for use in an x86 system (or PPC), not as a main CPU or even as a second CPU. It is a "PCI based multiprocessing solution for Intel compatible PC's [or Macs]".
There comes a time in every man's life when he must say, "No mother! I do not want any more Jell-O!"
\subject.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Temper, temper. Calm down. Witness the "Slot A" slot on my athlon. It looks physically identical to a connector for a PII mobo. Do 'ya think they'll work in each, however? No, which is why you read the tech specs..
Temper temper? To you I say Foolish Foolish. I did read the specs (you did not, because obviously you did not read the site before you posted, I did.) It could be pc66, 5v dimms, it doesn't matter, it is a dimm slot, and as you can see (that is if you have even read it at this point, something I am begining to doubt you ever will do) these dimm slots are CLEARLY occupied by cards with memory chips on them. Do you plan to argue that they might not be ram chips in order to justify your original post?
Furthermore, I hardly consider a visit to ONE vendor site a reasonable view of the market. Just recently I have read several reviews of 400W and 450W consumer power supplies. This Board is clearly not designed for consumer use, it is a 66mhz, 64bit pci device, a slot not found on consumer level motherboards, but you would have known this had you visited their page by now, wouldn't you?
This may be considerd a flame, but the root post of this thread is obviously a troll. If you are going to make statements about a product, please inform yourself about the product in question. Don't be the hardware equivelent of one of those foolish people who protests against movies they havn't seen.
NightHawk
Tyranny =Gov. choosing how much power to give the People.
Great use for the new bus. Too bad most traditional PCs don't support either yet. The only machines I know of that have 64/66 is the UltraSPARC-based machines.
Or are there x86 boxes out there that have it?
-- Ever notice that fast-burning fuse looks exactly the same as slow-burning fuse? I didn't... (Edgar Montrose)
Et pour ceux qui ne parlent pas francais (ou n'ont pas etudie Latin):
puissance/consummation = power (as in mhz)/(energy) consumption
just my blog and pix
So if you can put a bunch of these in a rackmount with a gig or two of RAM, wouldn't it be a cheaper alternative than a Beowulf cluster?
The PPC chips can have their endianess set either way, so no problems in that area.
I got an email, therefore it must be true
dcypher.net or SETI@home is not a _clever_ use. It is an obvious use. So let's not waste space yacking about it.
:)
OTOH, clusters are better when they have faster interconnections, so what if you got a mobo with a lot of PCI slots, and put a bunch of cards in it? PCI beats ethernet any day
#define X(x,y) x##y
#define X(x,y) x##y
Peter Cordes ; e-mail: X(peter@cordes ,
Sound is handled by a sound card,
Graphics is handled by a graphics card and now...
processing is handled by a processing card.
Cool.
Maybe they have a huge cache on the board? Also.. as another poster mentioned.. what are the power requirements? I have a 300W power supply, and 250 is already sucked by *just* the CPU + mobo. I know the G4 has low power requirements.. but can the mobo supply much more than it is now??
These cards are not new, but the idea of embeding Linux on a PowerPC MP system in a PC or Mac would be cool. All this needs is a dedicated 10/100 Enet port and away it goes as a high powered server for web or network gaming. The only problem is that it will be tied to the base system for power, configuration and control. Hence when the main system hangs and needs rebooting, this card gets rebooted/reloaded. I would hate to see Windoze on the base system. This card would be rebooted every hour or so. But, it we were to take a passive backplane and stick a ton of these in there, with a few SCSI RAID controllers and more than a few disks you could have yourself a nice compact cluster of high performance nodes to run Linux on.
Gotta love open-source.
--
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Now, take several of these cards, each with four processors and their own memory, and bus them together on a PCI backplane. Lotsa horsepower, no?
These would be all main processors, not peripherals like the cards mentioned here. No, they wouldn't run Windows or Linux, but I've been hankering for a chance to play with OS design anyway. :)
Methinks you are incorrect on this one. Please see this article, which talks about a quad processor g3 that was shown at LinuxWorld.
The Right Reverend K. Reid Wightman,
Umm... what about the PM 9500MP or the Umax s900 (or all those Daystar machines)? They ship with two 604e processors, and from my experiences with my s900, are really great machines. In fact, my s900 has a 603e and a 604e running together without any problems at whatsoever.
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.
Are these things like those Evergreen Celeron PCI (system on a card) upgradecards (www.evertech.com/accelerapci/) that are designed to upgrade old PCI sytems; Or like those Cyrix 686 200L PCI cards for Macs (to give 'em Windows compatibility through hardware), that use to be for sale in Mac shops?
What a waste! Why spend on all that money on one or more G4s and then stick it in a PCI slot? That's like putting a ferrari engine in a VW beetle. Sure the bug goes fast, but don't you think you could have found a better use for that engine? PCI slots are fast, but not nearly fast enough for this to be a worthwhile venture. You wanna build a cheap supercomputer? Wulf it instead! At least that way you'll get the full potential of the processor and not choke off a great chip.
WURD!!
I doubt that you could use it on AGP. AGP=Accelerated Graphics Port Anyone wanna start a new MOBO company to have full bus speed adapter slots for these puppies? We could make a killing!
WURD!!
We've had a quad g3/g4 board at work since the end of last year. It runs Linux without problem and is much faster than I expected (I did expect high too :-).
I think the Vizualize workstations by HP are PA-RISC running HP-UX. We have a B180L (lowest end HP-UX box HP makes) with a 180MHz procesor and 64M RAM. Current cost is around $10K; so even if Linux was ported to PA-RISC (which it may have been by now, I don't know) you could probably save a bunch o money going with the x86 mobo's instead :).
- Sig
No kidding. My G3 gets tanked at least twice a week, and cleaning up after it is becoming a freakin' nuisance. Jose Cuervo and coolant paste makes a horrible reek, and don't even get me started on the effects of black coffee on a PowerBook's keyboard...
-----------------------------------------------
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
these dimm slots are CLEARLY occupied by cards with memory chips on them
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.
Just recently I have read several reviews of 400W and 450W consumer power supplies.
And yet.. no link.
Don't be the hardware equivelent of one of those foolish people who protests against movies they havn't seen.
Practice what you preach.
And of course "a while" isn't very long at all, which is why these things are so darn neat.
--
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Looks like you can attach, among other things, an ethernet port (maybe more than one?) to this baby. It would be really cool if someone used these to build a super-server-on-steroids. Think about it: a bunch of these boards, each running several copies of some server, with the host machine left to manage the cards, complete disk I/O requests, and provide a user interface. This would also seem to me to be more secure than a traditional network of independent servers, since a whole farm might be reduced to a single machine. I would sure like to write that software someday! Thoughts, anyone?
Washington, DC: It's like Hollywood for ugly people.
1) Heavy processing, obviously. Crypto, graphics...
2) Bunch of servers in 1 box.
3) Gaming ^_^
Eh...
This is spiffy and all, but I'd like to get a hold of a G4 board that'll go in an ATX case. Does anyone make such a beast (besides Apple)?
The boards run linux. I can't figure out what type of parallel processing they use. On the one hand, they refer to mapping all of the memory on up to 8 boards into a single address space (like SMP), but on the other, the also make a product to use MPI (like Beowulfs) on MacOS.
If they are less than about $2500 for a quad G4 board, this may be even cheaper than the KLAT-2 cluster's $650 / GFLOPS discussed here a while back.
Isn't there suppose to be an issue with the PowerPC 750 that doesn't allow for multi proccessing. The PowerPC 7400 (G4) does.
I remember trying asking Daystar about multiple G3 and they said it couldn't be done due to something involving the L2 Cache.
It looks like these boards can induvidually send the processes out to the chips. Unlike the actual Dual G4 boards from PowerLogix.
...and I'm not sure we should trust this Kyle Sagan either.
Yeah it would, it just wouldn't be a Personal Computer, it would be a Parallel Computer. Although I think I could find a use for all those extra clocks. Dedicated Q3 server, perhaps?
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses
Although 4 G4s is a lot of processing power. I get the feeling that you could probably compress mpegs at about the same speed that you can feed uncompressed image data.
To put my two cents in, I think it would totally kick ass if transmeta were to come up with a 4 processor board that you could put in a laptop. If the average battery life of a laptop battery is around 1-2 hours, and a transmeta laptop can supposedly run for up to eight hours, could you actually have a four processor transmeta laptop with the same battery life as the single intel/motorola based laptops we have today?
There are a large number of ways to hook multiple CPUs together, many of which have been tried, but only two have been successful: symmetrical shared-memory multiprocessors (SMP), and networked clusters. Many millions of dollars of government money have gone into R&D on nifty ways to hook lots of CPUs together to build a supercomputer, starting with the Illiac IV (1970s), the Connection Machine (1980s), and the BBN Monarch (1990s). None of these led to anything people wanted to buy, even people with big problems and budgets. Vanilla architecture wins again.
http://www.totalimpact.com/G3_MP.html
:-(
Notice that
1) the PCI card is taller than standard height, this limits the number of desktops which can use the card. Hence: PC/*AT* & Older PowerMacs
2) "possible" interface cards... interprets as PMC site available there but software drivers need work.
3) now ask about parallel abstraction layers & tools...
Large parallel systems are quite useful here, but my Total mPOWER boards have (so far) been less useful than the original packing material that the Total mPOWER boards were.
Yeah, it should work, M-O-L is meant to completely
abstract all the layers below. So if a box can
run LinuxPPC it can (or at least should be able to) run MOL.
ARM processors use around the tenth of the power that a PPC require.
If a PPC burns less than a Pentium, it still burns a lot compared to these.
Please check on the ARM website for the actual specs of these processors, maybe it'll look like science-fiction to you.
--
Trolling using another account since 2005.
My question is how did they write that web page without once regressing into a monster-truck announcer's voice?
:>
They probably do if you phone them up
--
Delphis
I understand that he mentioned ARM. When I said AMD, I was simply stating that your average AMD chip dissipates even more. I was commenting on the CISC architecture of most Wintel boxes. When complaining about power consumption, look first to the Intel and AMD world, then complain about the four G4s which eat as much power as your Pentium.
It's only when we've lost everything, that we are free to do anything...
Just use one of those
Well, yeah. Even the ISA bus used to run at processor speed.
:-)
Then the system bus started running faster than the expansion bus. (286 time?)
Then the processor started running faster than the system bus. (486DX2, DX4, and Blue Lightning)
What's next? Processors running faster than their on-chip cache?
We should find out more at MWNY in three weeks. They probably won't announce multiprocessor boxes yet, though.
--
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Hey! Where are the dirty pictures?
Brian Seppanen
Minister of Information and Propaganda
Area 54 The Secret Government Disco Labs Provo
I'm sure I'm not the only one - I bet a lot of businesses could use a configurable PCI processor plugin to soup up their machines.
If it can be done for G3's it must be able to be done with other processors..
Anyone seen anything along those lines?
[ insert meme here ]
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.
From the article:
Memory:
Two 168 DIMM sites, support for up to 512Mb of SDRAM, 3.3V, unbuffered PC-100 DIMMs.
As distinct from:
Level 2 Cache:
1Mb of L2 "Backside Cache" per processor.
The board design would be far simpler with the DIMMs as dedicated memory instead of cache, the DIMMs are described as "memory", and the article makes no mention of direct access to system memory; the only reasonable conclusion is that the DIMMs are standalone memory, as the previous poster pointed out to you.
10% of comments - lameass dumb trolls.
20% of comments - can you imagine...a beowolf
cluster of these?
30% of comments - actually, I'm a really really
smart bloke and I know
everything about everything so
moderate this comment up!
35% of comments - karma whorin - come on siggy,
you _know_ you're gonna post
simply to collect yet more
karma. What was it at last time
I checked? 750? I thought so...
5% of comments - I love Microsoft, please flame
me. LOOK! Here's my private
"business correspondance only"
email address, why don't you
hit my corporate email server
with a nasty DDOS just because
I'm obviously a secret MSFT
lover and must be stopped at all
costs.
1% of comments - Really really fscking irritating
statisticians who just _have_ to
tell me that I can't add up...
--
Jon.
http://www.jonmasters.org/
Did you clean your glasses ? ;-) :
I wrote ARM
A, for Advanced,
R, for Risc,
and M for Machines.
The ARM is the world best sold microprocessor.
There might be one in your handy as there might be at least one in your PC (and one in your Psion).
A typical ARM processor burn less than a Watt.
The ARM/Digital hybrid, the StrongARM (now belonging to Intel), burns a little more.
I'd really like Slashdot open a section about these as, you'll see on their webpages that they really developped major computing products and technologies since they were funded by Element 14, formerly known as Acorn Computers.
The ARM processor is the simplest processor ever, maybe with the F-21 CPU. Coding it is a pleasure, I think most former/current ARChimedes will agree with me.
--
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Photoshop, PovRay, Final Cut... put one of these babies in my G4 box, and that Avid at work will eat my dust.
For starters, as others have pointed out, these are slave processors, so by definition, putting this in does not make an SMP box. The S in SMP stands for symmetric, and while the CPU's on the card are symmetric, the card is not symmetric with the main CPU(s).
The way this works is much closer to a mainframe running VM with partitioned systems underneath it. You submit a job by tossing it over the wall to the VM partition (in this case one of these cards) and wait for it to toss the results back. You can probably watch the job some way with a properly written VM subsystem. You probably can't run interactive programs on these cards and if you can, you really wouldn't want to since you would clobber the PCI bus sending keystrokes and screens back and forth. And don't even think about trying to run a GUI on one of these cards.
What these cards are perfect for is batch processing. You write up a queuing mechanism to accept jobs and farm them out to the cards as they become available. The main CPU would manage the UI and the queue. The Cards have their own memory (max 512mb which is not a lot for this type of work) so you can get reasonable performance as long as the data sets are small enough to be loaded into memory on the card.
What this means is that the type of processing you can do with these is limited by the PCI bandwidth and the memory on the card. I don't think this is as great and wonderful as it looks. It's really cool, and if you need to run lots of compute intensive programs with smallish data sets it then this is ideal, but it will choke on high transaction rates and large data environments. Databases are an absolute no-no unless you really hate your PCI bus and want to try and burn it out.
The number of IRQs is a function of the microprocessor architecture. The x86 design has only 16 for the resources of the entire motherboard, so some of the IRQs are reserved for things like drive controllers, bus bridges, etc. 256 IRQs is technically possible, but with a different hardware archtecture that would support it. Then the OS would have to be re-written to take advantage of all the new IRQs (probably possible for an open source OS, but not your favorate closed-source variety).
science is a religion
An ARM processor may indeed use 1/2 the power of a PowerPC processor... but PPC still takes up about 1/4 to 1/3 of what a Pentium III, PIII Xeon, or Athlon guzzles. PPC has a -much- lower transistor count and has a cleaner design (Arstechnica had some good explanations of this a few months ago). Perhaps you're confusing Alpha with PowerPC?
...all the power of a Mac, with none of the style. I'd feel more enthusiastic if Total Impact would at least throw in a couple of sheets of blue plexiglas we could stick on our beige boxes.
:)
O2s only had MIPS R5000 or R10000 processors, AFAIK. At least, the ones around here did. They aren't that good. Oh, and their graphics system pretty much blows.
You could tear the ass off some RC5 cracking with this beast and the PPC client.
Also, SETI@Home offers a PPC client that would benefit from this.
I may have to get me a couple of these.
--
Ok i'm probably way off the mark with this one...
After reading stuff about the user space Linux additions to the kernel it struck me that this could be the one very interesting way forward to use this kind of technology. IANA(Kernel Hacker) (just an interested on-looker), what i have read about user space Linux is that it works to provide a fully virtalized Linux environment. This means that you can host various virtual machines on a single box, each of which is isolated from eachother and the base system (yeah, just like Linux on the S/390). This is great for preventing hackers getting into your machine as the best they can do is crash a virtual environment not the base system. Anyway that is my take on user space Linux.
Now just imagine if user space Linux could be extended to use cards like this one to provide extra processing power. If you can abstract the hardware to a level where the virtual Linux machine looks just like your everyday Linux server but any processes running would automatically take advantage of the extra processing power then you hve a real winner! Beats the pants off just using this card as a seti@home or d.net number cruncher.
Ok this has problems, how do you get programs to run on both x86 (or whatever your host system is) and PPC processors? not easy.
This kind of concept could change the way we think about computers in a big way... Still Tao (the makers of the new Amiga OS) are already there, just waiting for recognition.
Bring on the future!
Many Apple Power Macintosh computers and clones use a processor card. The first of which was the Power Mac 9500 (mid 1995). Apple offered a dual-processor card for awhile and Daystar Digital even had a 9500 clone with a quad processor card (a great BeOS demo box back in the day). Beige and Blue-And-White Power Mac G3s use a -tiny- processor card (containing the PowerPC 750 "G3" processor, L2 cache, and a small fan-less heatsink) that connects to the mother board via a ZIF connector. Early Power Mac G4s uses this as well, though the current models (those with AGP) use a funky new type of connector.
Does this run Linux well? Does linux do multiprocessor PPC?
--
_|_
The above is not worth reading.
http://www.compute-aid.com/atx350w.htmls u/p ?category=power%5Fmanagement&mfg=enlight
350 watt for $55
http://www.overclockers.com.au/techstuff/r_lm400p
400 watt supply
http://www.axiontech.com/cgi-local/manufacture.as
another 400w supply
normaly i think you raise some valid points but
do your homework
They're asking ~$4500 for the 4 G3's and ~$6500 for the 4 G4's. Each board comes with 128MB of RAM. This courtesy of http://www.xlr8yourmac.com
I just bought an Athlon 800 yesterday!
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
Tom Geller
Just a quickie, FYI: There *IS* a new version of "Oscar" for System 8+ (After I wrote my earlier message, I waxed nostalgic and surfed the web to grab another copy - someone sohuld adapt this for windows...) at many of the extension digest sites.
"I'm not even supposed to BE here today!"
"Let me open these blinds so the snipers can see in." - Kevin Giffhorn
I'm not sure if this is correct, but I don't think you can run any OS on these things. They are designed to be given tasks to run from your regular OS. Also Apple don't licence their OS to other vendors anymore, so Its unlikely that anyone would build a MacOS compatible card like the SUNpci cards (you can get something similar for a mac as well).
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
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.
Be ot or bot ne ot, taht is the nestquoi.
actually, AIX is probably the worst thing for telecoms. Weird things happen to AIX when you have large numbers of processes (though that may not be a requirement for telco stuff). An embedded would be much, much better.
--- only for the squeamish
My first reaction was "Wow, more CPU power!". And then, I actually though what could we do with that beast.
I'm sure those would be useful in niche markets, like imaging/multimedia where special custom software could offload some huge operation to the card while the main CPU deals with the user interface. But that's not my field so I have no idea of the feasability.
Many people mentioned 'Beowulf'! Now, Beowulf is a scientific cluster, and I happen to know a fair bit on the subject, since I work for a research center.
Most scientific applications need lots of CPU power, but also lots of memory bandwidth: for example, simulating the flow of air around an airplane wing what a dataset of 5 GB...
So from the start, the data cache of the CPUs are nearly useless since we cicle through huge amounts of data, the CPU constantly reads and write to memory. The net result is that a standard PC isn't able to keep more than two CPU fed with data before the system bus becomes a bottleneck. Since the mPOWER card has a standard PC bus, only two of the four CPUs would actually be used.
Next, the memory. 512MB isn't actually a lot for scientific clusters. That what you usually have for each CPU. It's a bit tight, but let's live with it.
Finally, the benefit of this kind of card would be to cram a PC box with a number of those, to actually save money by not needing additional hard drives, cases, keyboard, cheap graphic adapter, etc.
The typical PCI bus (64 bit, 66MHz) has a bandwidth of just under 4 Gbps. It is a bus, so only one device can use it at the same time (half-duplex). The usually clustering interconnect (Mirinet or SCI) offers 1 Gbps full-duplex, so let's say 2Gps to compare with the PCI bus.
Let's also say that the host CPU in a multi-mPOWER card situation isn't doing any actual work to let the bus free for the mPOWER.
The means you can put two mPOWER cards in a single system before each card will get lower interconnect than if you had a standard dual-CPU machine with a SCI or mirinet adapter. And that's even before the need to access any disk or network device, which would cause additional traffic on the PCI bus, reducing the overall available bandwidth. That's not much of a win.
Of course, not all application need to have gobles of memory. distributed.net-like application, where the dataset is tiny, could make use of all the 8 cards in one system. I just think that those applications are the minority is scientific computing.
Yikes, it just occurred to me that much of the readership wasn't born at this point, but . . .
.m :)
the bus and processor used to run at the same rate. There were many systems in which the processor plugged into the backplane jsut like any other card. S-100, PDP-11 (and others) behaved this way, as well as other lesser known formats. Others took an approach that was similar: the Apple II exposed everything to the bus, and a processor card could flat-out take over. There were a few hybrid systems that used S-100 for expansion, but had a motherboard with a processor and possibly memory.
Then processors started running fasterthan 4mhz . .
If these were modified to use AGP (or an AGP-like bus) that would give a tremendous advantage. PCI DMA was fast a few years ago, but AGP allows almost direct access to memory windows, which would allow these processors far more bandwidth and system interaction, as well as reducing contention for a narrow PCI bus.
That said, I think this would also be good for distributed.net and SETI, or whatever other data-cruncher you happen to favor.
Is it possible to run a pci-processor-machine with just the card?
----
Oh my god, Bear is driving! How can this be?
ADVENTURERS! - ANTIHERO FOR HIRE - CARDMASTER CONFLICT
If you read the post, it says that these cards will work inside a x86 on binaries that contain PPC binary from a cross compiler...
What would seem sweet...and maybe not to hard to do would be to have some thing capable of running 99.9% of the binaries in existence. While we can run many progs under x86 (WINE, vmware), the PPC will allow us to run LinuxPPC-native and even (if you so desire, but maybe not) MacOS binaries. Now we won't have the ROM (maybe the new-world ROM files will solve this), be we WILL have Darwin to work from for something in a more of a WINE like compatability. If the New-world ROM can be used, it may be possible to get something as complex as mol up on your x86 workstation. Imagine having one workstation where you, the HellDesk employee, could run *NIX ( Lin/BSD, natively), vmware (WinXX), and mol (MacOS 9+) from the same workstation... simoultaneously (ignoring the 512M RAM you'd probably need). In environments that have great OS diversity, this would be great (Universities come to mind).
It would be more beneficial to Mac owners to have the reverse for compatability (putting a PIII or K7 on a PCI in your Mac). There are several companies that do this (and probably have patents) such as OrangeMicro which are anally retaining the hardware specs last I heard. And they only develop drivers for MacOS. Plus I think they require special versions of the OS's that run under the hardware anyway.
You also have the possibility to now section off hardware to a virtual environment (similar to IBM's 390's) because you can easily quantize the resources allocated to each environment by PCI card...
- Sig
Tyan has at least one motherboard with 2 64-bit slots on it, but not being familiar with the spec, I don't know what windows can do with it. Nice motherboard though, their newest scsi-on-board mobo.
-Tannin Kal
If I have a PC with one of these thingies installed, what should I call it? It wouldn't really be a "PC", would it?
Any suggestions?
Yes, but will they release it to the public so Jeff Goldblum will have something to do?
*In Dr. Evil Voice*
RRRriiiiiiiggghhhtt....
What do people expect to pay for one of these. I checked out the homepage, and a cursory glance did not reveal any price, but I mean... Jesus people, four G4's on a PCI bus! Woohoo! Time to break open my pickle jar bank account and sigh again.
The SETI@home folks have just gotta be licking their chops. As well as anyone planning to Beowulf, "And now I run a six node cluster in one boxen!"
that just sounds kinda odd......
Lemure, wtf! Don't you mean Lemur?
I'm not entirely sure I understand what this would mean. Would this increase the speed of the machine when running everyday apps, or (practically speaking) would this be limited to very specialized programs that like to hog processor (buying a processor for your program rather than the other way around for a change..) ?
PowerPC processors are not well known for their sobriety. Most people willing to add these boards to their servers should seriously think about upgrading their power supplies too, especially if they also use RAID disks or whatever.
BTW, multi-processor, (Strong)ARM-based boards are also being worked upon by companies such as Simtec ; given the average power needs of an ARM processor and the low FPU based needs of a server, this is an interesting alternative (though I am not sure these are out yet).
--
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Evergreen sell a PCI Celeron upgrade card for old PCI systems that has a BX chipset, a couple of So-dmm slots, & a socket 370, complete with a Celeron, check www.evertech/accelerapci/. Also I remember back in 97 you use to be able to get Cyrix 686L 200 PCI cards for Macs, so that they'd be windows compatible with the penalty of soft windsows emulation.
Why not make an AGP version of the card? sure, pci is nice, but realy fast pci is better. Of course, i have no clue if AGP can be used for anything other than graphics... anyone know? from what i see, you're using a 66mhz bus which would be fine for machines that are that slow, but if you have a 133mhz motherboard, theres gonna be some noticeable slowdown simply due to bus speed, not to mention software.
~~~ They call me Little John, but don't let the name fool you...in real life I'm very big.
This is cool, for the right class of problem. I doubt you'd see this in a mainstream server, remember this will be running specialized cross compiled code which just reads & writes to system memory. There would be no real system level interface except back on the native x86 processor once it got the results. Anything running on it would be specially ported although it looks like it can support interface cards of it's own accord. It sounds like the ultimate seti@home processing system once someone ports the client :-). One thing that isn't clear, it runs ELF binaries but I assume you'd have to upload the executable to it's memory first it wouldn't see the native file system, is this correct? Would it be able to read & write to a memory mapped file? One other issue, memory endianess would be reversed with this processor vs x86 right? So your memory communications would have to twiddle all the bytes based on data type of you wanted to do anything with the results on an x86 or other linux native application right?
Does anyone here have any experience using this system?
Can this thing breath life in to my windows applications as well? I'm stuck using design software on windows at work and sometimes it is just dog slow.
Hey, even back in 1988, the good'ole Amiga 2000 had a processor slot. I remember there were 286,386 and 486 cards available and PPC cards as well for the A4000. And it was *very* cool.
Man, running DOS or Windows in a window *without* emulation was über cool.
-- It's always darker before it goes pitch black.
Okay, so now the Power-part of the PowerMac is sold seperately... When are they gonna ship the Mac-part (nice purple, green, red, yellow and plastic designer looks) on a card? I really would like my PC to look funky! And i've got a couple of PCI slots left...
I'm not sure everyone would have sue for this, but a pci card that used the bus for little (if anything) more than power and a fast lan connection. Plug a p3+ram+video+?sound card into a pci slot, plug in a keyboard, mouse, monitor, maybe speakers, and you've got a dual (or more) mobo case. You could either mount a filesystem from the "host" mobo, or toss an IDE connection on the baord as well. Sound too small to be true? The EspressoPC did it, and while it would obviously have some nasty power requirements, and while it wouldn't be for everyone, it would have a wide number of potential uses:
1: Simply a multi-mobo case.
2: High-bandwidth clustering (run the cards headless )
3: Multi-processor environment, offload jobs to separate environs with their own memory, real and virtual.
4: Multi-OS. Use a monitor switch and some neat cross-mounted filesystems, or Wine/VMWare/whatever for os-in-a-window without emulation.
There are obviously more. It would take some work to make sure it wasn't used as a mere novelty, but in specialized applications could be increidbly powerful.
-Tannin Kal
"... there are no programs for Linux on PowerPC anyways."
:\
Actually, the only software that I've had real difficulty getting to build in run on a PowerPC, with regard to Linux, is the kernel itself
-rozzin.
A while back Sun came out with a pci card that added a k6-2 processor with 64mb of memory to an ultrasparc, and software that allowed you to run windows. Is this similar? Can you run MacOS over these cards on an intel-based machine?
Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose
My question is how did they write that web page without once regressing into a monster-truck announcer's voice?
Suddenly my open pci slots became much more valuable.
tcd004
Send a Postcard!
"...they can run in Intel machines."
I'll be the first to admit: When it comes to hardware, I have only the vaguest idea what I'm talking about. But I don't understand this line. I went to the website, which was even less clear.
These things are MBs, right? That take PowerPCs? So what does it mean that they "run in Intel machines"? And "Intel machine" is presumably something with a chip from Intel. Does this mean that I can have a computer with two MBs? Or that I can put Intel chips on this MB? Or what?
--
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
Somehow I missed this the first (and second and third and fourth) time around: The board goes in a PCI slot. So I can offload processing from my CPU to these things. Weird.
--
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
To the best of my knowledge, the PCI bus is limited in bandwidth to the following speedss:
With the max theoretical bus bandwidth at 520MB/sec, wouldn't that cause serious bottlenecks when you throw on an extra 3-4 CPU's?
Just a thought...
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
Lex orandi, lex credendi.
Besides, the best solution for telecom on PowerPC is AIX.
;)
Merge the two, then we can say "smit g4card"
Indeed, Win2k has support for this, but it is using Virtual IRQ's that only exist in software. The hardware is using 16 IRQ's AFAIK. However there are machines that can do 64, though so far I have only seen that in high-end servers.
Well like you say you'd be bus limited. You still get way more bandwidth over AGP4x with fast writes. You couldn't compete with hardware (on the card) t&l. I expect some stuff would be faster, you could reject back faces and cull to frustum per primitive so if you had a lame app with display lists you might win, but you'd have to store the display list geometry on the PCI card, you would just get hosed trying to send it to the cards over PCI then get it back transformed.
You wouldn't need a driver per processor but all told it's only uninteresting for the stated problem because of the bandwidth requirement. This is exactly the kind of problem this card is there to solve provided you have a greater compute to i/o bandwidth ratio.
Sometimes I wish I was a better electrical engineer. For the longest time I've wanted to get a 6502 processor, reverse-engineer the Nintendo, and draft a PCI card that lets you upload ROMS and play them on non-emulated (and therefore theoretically perfect) hardware.
The video card would have to have a TV in, and there would have to be an audio patch so CD audio could still work, but it could be done.
And, of course, the ever-lovin' legal issue of having electronic copies of ROMS you don't own...
this is a sig.
That free PCI card slot in my G3 suddenly became much more valuable. I wonder how many G4 chips I can afford?
I wonder if this can be integrated will with existing chips in a Macintosh computer via the Multiprocessing extension in Mac OS 9. Perhaps Mac OS X will make use of this great resource. Mmm... superserver!