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ARM-Based ATX Mobos
mirko writes: "Chalice Technologies has released an ARM-based ATX motherboard : the CATS.
The CATS supports SDRAM, USB and PCI among other features, which makes it easy for anybody to assemble a reliable computer with low-cost equipment. Regarding their price along with their ability to run both ARMLinux or NetBSD, these boards are an interesting alternative to set up a cheap but powerful server."
too expensive! not to mention the only dealer that carries them has a total of about 3 html pages on their site not labeled as under construction...
These boards ought to be able to outperform a cheap Pentium with one clock cycle tied behind its back. ARMLinux, though still limited to kernel 2.0, is fine. The combination of these boards and ARMLinux should be perfectly suitable to inexpensive servers or network gateway machines.
a motherboard suited for my BDSM needs... wait a minute, BSD? Oh damn, got my hopes up...
"God is dead." - Nietzsche
"God does not play dice with the Universe." - Albert Einstein
"Stop telling God what to do." - Niels Bohr
It's apparently going to run about $550 US if my conversion from uk pounds are correct. Ouch. And that's just for the board + CPU...
What about software? How much free software is supported out of the box for NetBSD?
Go get your free Palm V (25 referrals needed only!)
Oh, and of course these ARM-based boards can't run Windows, which could be considered (heh) a good thing...
How cheap? Cheaper than plugging a Celery into a BX motherboard?
This looks like a platform for ARM-based prototyping. You probably can build a server (or a workstation) out of it, but why?
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
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A little bit more $$$ in my bank account, and this would be a great little system to develop projects on.
Eh...
Wow... I might have a pick up a couple... :-)
The ARM is best at integer math right? I am looking for a cheap platform for doing image processing on a massive scale. Might need DSP's... do'h.
Anwho, looks like it would make a nice web/ftp server... or maybe a firewall...
Yup.
I've just bought one of these faster processors
:-) )
for an Acorn PowerPC. Had this system been RiscOS
compatible I would have begrudged paying top
dollar for the upgrade, but when dealing with
users your primary driver for the computer is the
applications it will run.
RiscOS is an operating system which gives MacOS a
run for its money in the usability stakes.
These creatures are fast and silent (no fans
on the CPU, hell, not even a heat sink
Unfortunately I believe this particular
machine's battle for survival will be
lost over applications and device drivers, no
matter how good the motherboard is its not much
use when you have nothing to run and can't plug
devices in.
-- Don't believe everything you read, hear or think
I don't know much about the ARM family of processors. How does a 233mhz ARM compare to, for example, a 233mhz Pentium II?
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
What's the overclocking potential of a system like this? Could this be the "next big thing" for the overclocking crowd?
233 seems too low a number for a "modern" machine...how long until someone makes it into a 500mhz monster?
The CATS supports SDRAM, USB and PCI among other features
... An interesting alternative to set up a cheap but powerful server.
Will they have to pay RAMBUS royalties?
Why don't they make these thing's to run RiscOS anyone know?
-- Superlame http://catpro.dragonfire.net/joshua/
How do they expect this thing to make it in the desktop market w/out including an AGP slot? W/out AGP support this thing is just going to be relegated to the server market, and there's no way it will out-perform a dual Celeron on a cost/speed basis.
Also, even if they can make a go of it as a server (and remember that the server market is atrophying quickly in favor of massively clustered Linux boxes), they don't offer RAID support OR onboard SCSI.
I don't think this thing's gonna fly too well.
I thought the whole point of ARM was for making low-power devices. Doesn't slapping one on an ATX board kind of defeat the purpose? I mean, people don't usually worry about power consumption in desktops, and the CPU fan isn't what makes that much noise.
And as far as 'low cost', if this board+chip is more then $60, it still won't beat out a AMD k6/Celeron or even a 'duron' solution in terms of price. And if the chips aren't faster then about 400mhz (well, or way faster in terms of ops/clock), Then they still loose to a k6/Celeron. How fast can these chips go, anyway? The fastest I've ever heard was 200mhz, has that changed?
Anyway, this might sound interesting to hardware geeks, but as far as a general purpose, cheap-ass server x86 still sounds like a better solution to me.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Like everyone else, I'm reeling from the sticker shock. From the posts I've seen on the capabilities of the ARM processor, a PIII CPU/mobo at the same price would blow the ARM out of the water. Now, if it had another advantage, like ran on a couple of AAAs, or would crack 56bit DES encryption like it was nothing, then you would have something here. As it stands, the economic benefits of the PIII outweigh any engineering benefits of the ARM processor
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses
350 pounds for mobo+cpu+32mb+cdrom and 750 pounds
for a whole system. Not a good price if you just
want to build a server. Probably good for embedded applications or developing for ARM single boards.
http://www.chaltech.com/images/atx_large.jpg
I like the nature approach. Makes me wonder if these motherboards are really "rock solid"...
:)
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Yeah, but if I sign up for 3 years of MSN I can get $400 off! /me bitchslaps himself
Dissenter
Dissenter
"There is no knowledge that is not power."
A board like the Mac MultiProcessor Boards for StrongArm's would bring more bang for the buck
in the long run, by using less power, creating less heat (less costs for air conditioning, case fans),
and possibly cheaper motherboards/processors.
Arun
ISA slots?
Why even bother with ISA Slots?
I guess you have to include them if your system is supposed to be a low cost solution. But why more than one? For compatibility purposes?
Is there a reason it has to have ISA????
Sorry if i missed something obvious...
-Sleen
It's all about MicroChannel, isn't it ;)
You sure do, you-sure-do.
Why win9x really sucks
If someone wonders why ISA or why only 66MHz and no 100 or 133MHz SDRAMs: This board has been released 2 years ago!
(NetBSD has support for the CATS since Oct. 17th 1998 in the tree, so it's probably a few months older.)
I looked at these a few months ago. If you check the only distrubtor Chalice mentions, these things come in at 350 pounds bare which works out to about $527 for us yanks. Compared to x86 motherboards, that's an awful lot. (OK, it's not completely bare, it has a 32 Meg DIMM and comes with a CD. That doesn't make it worth it.)
I'd love to build a StrongARM machine, but that's more than 4 times what I just paid for a new dual-processor x86 motherboard (the Abit BP6). I couldn't justify the expense.
CVS is teh suck. Use Vesta instead.
But for $550, just for the mobo/cpu, I suspect it'll see few takers outside of people that need test beds for developing embedded systems.
Actually, I seem to recall seeing this site referenced, probably on Slashdot, a few months ago as a "source of StrongARM motherboards." Based on RCS logs, I've had a link at My Linux VAR page since January 14, 2000, which probably means that this purported "news" is actually "olds," likely mentioned at Slashdot in early-to-mid-January. I noticed then that the pricing was "a bit frightening."
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
Any word when will we see Transmeta based m/boards? Anyone know any manufacturers looking to attract the general desktop market rather than portables?
Do your best, hope for the best, suspect the worst.
Every reference I can find on the Web defines it Synchronous DRAM.
The Cats board is about 3 years old, (I believe it was supported in about 96-97 by NetBSD (I think it was in version 1.3 ) That's why it has ISA slots.
I believe it is actually supported by the latest linux's. I don't know for sure, my arm unix exp is from NetBSD, which it is supported by, people still have them on the arm32 list for NetBSD.
I remember at the time thinking that cats boards were good value for money, these days they're not, but that's what time does for you. The reason for the price, cos they're made in low volume by a 2 man company at the time. I'm not even sure the company has survived after Acorn died a couple of years back.
Something puzzling me is why is this getting posted as news? It's 3 years old or so...
strongarm beowulf, though it sadly seems kinda deadish :(
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
slickwillie's right on both counts.
1) Yes, If Rambus Inc decide to (and most likely will) use their new patent ruling to charge insane lisense fees to SDRAM manufacturers and artificially drive up the price of SDRAM to make it more competitive with RDRAM, then part of your dollars will go to Rambus. The people making the motherboard won't, AFAIK, but the memory manufacturers will.
2) It is Synchronous DRAM.
The problem is that while the boards may outperform a "cheap Pentium," they're priced at the price of a motherboard and a 700 MHz Pentium III, which is not exactly a "cheap Pentium."
If you're in Saskatchewan, you're probably looking at the motherboard and CPU costing you $1K CDN, plus whatever sales taxes get assessed.
What it's suitable for is as a "test bed" if you are planning to design embedded systems based on StrongARM.
If the plan is to deploy it in its own right, it's terribly overpriced.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
'cuz it's pronounced like that.
How about a modem? Most pci modems are crappy winmodems anyhow. External modems suck because they cost more.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
that certanly sucks
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
This obscure company I've never heard of are selling an ARM ATX motherboard, and IBM/Motorola still can't supply POP motherboards/chipsets? Sheesh.
I swear, it's like any platform that I get interested in, goes nowhere. :( Maybe I should get into Windows running on Pentiums.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I'm thinking of using one of these (either a LART or maybe one of these) in a vacuum environment to drive some CCD cameras. I've been led to believe the StrongARM chips run a whole lot cooler than the Intel chips, but I think they're a fair bit slower as well. I'll have to figure out what sort of speed I can accept. Regards, Brian
I believe it's more of a development, hobbiest, tinkerer, workstation kind of thing. No one in their right mind would buy an ARM as a desktop system. (At least, not in this form.)
Things may have changed since I was dealing with this (a couple years ago)...
If you are designing a system-on-a-chip ASIC and need a low-power, low-silicon-consumption, high-performance processor to embed, your choices were pretty much limited to the ARM and the MIPS families. And they were also limited by the fab you chose - most had one or the other available, few had both.
There are several big advantages to doing your software development on a platform that runs the same instruction set as the target or a superset of it. Two big ones:
- You can use the native development environment. (This was even more important a couple years back, because gcc's cross-platform support was badly broken.)
- You can run most of the target code on the workstation.
MIPS machines have been available with unix and linux for a very long time. Think SGI. (We bought a Cobalt Qube just to get a development environment for MIPS, after wasting more than its cost trying to get gcc/g++ to compile for a MIPS on a Sun. Found out later that we'd have needed a few hundred lines of patch from Cygnus to get cross-gcc to work.)
This board, running the Linux or BSD environments, provides an equivalent for the ARM family.
ARM cores tend to be smaller and lower power than MIPS for equivalent functionality. Being able to throw together an ARM development environment by stuffing this board into a PC case and loading Linux onto it is a great boon to garage-shop "fabless semiconductor companies".
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Its very hard to beat the MOPS/cycle of cheap PC's. The only DSP's to come close performance wise are TI's VLIW DSP's, and those are hella expensive.
Of course if size and heat are a problem you have to look elsewhere... the CPU/DSP hybrids are cool too (TriCore, SH3-DSP etc).
Interesting to read comments about this being 3 years old. Odd that it had USB at that time?
I also followed some links and saw it priced at 350 pounds, hardly low cost I would think, what's a 810 board and a cheap celeron cost today? Less than that, and it would perform better.
If these guys produced a version with Intel's forthcomming StrongARM2 at 600MHz or so (sorry, can't seem to find the press releases) might be more attractive.
This is old news-
the page is over a year old.
Last Modified: Thursday, March 25, 1999 8:16:14 PM Local time
Last Modified: Friday, March 26, 1999 3:16:14 AM GMT
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it wouldn't be a troll, now would it?
Ever get the impression that your life would make a good sitcom?
Ever follow this to its logical conclusion: that your life is a sitcom?
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
... a Beowulf cluster of morons like this?
Ever get the impression that your life would make a good sitcom?
Ever follow this to its logical conclusion: that your life is a sitcom?
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
their web server isn't y2k compliant =]
Ever get the impression that your life would make a good sitcom?
Ever follow this to its logical conclusion: that your life is a sitcom?
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
...the good ol' GUS MAX of course!! =)
I swear, this is no different from any other crap specialty board available.
The price >$500 specifically makes it a prototype board with limited production. You can get SA prototypes anywhere for that much dough! And this thing is old as heck!
Could we possibly research a little before posting? Could we be a little competent in providing news?
If you don't know what you are talking about, don't post! You aren't impressing anyone who isn't full of crap (less than 5% of posters now).
I have looked into SA boards a few years ago. You don't want ATX based, this goes against everything SA has. You want a biscuit size, and it to have a large firmware and nic. Then you can shove Linux on it and use it as a firewall, encryptor, etc. Then you can hang it off (or inside) your webserver by NFS.
Still you can't get them below prototype price, because no one uses them! Now, I would look at Celeron or Mobile P2 biscuits instead. Still expensive, but software R&D cost is low.
Matt
I understand you are disappointed by the fact that Simtec web site is under reconstruction, thus only consisting of 3 HTML pages.
We (The Acorn Users Community) have been knowing them for a long time and previously remarked them (e. g. for cooking a multiprocessor board in Acorn's RiscPCs along with coding the multithreading module required by RiscOS to benefit from it).
Concerning the price, there is quite a big difference between a hand-made board like the CATS and an industrially produced Taiwanese board supposed to be replaced in 6 months because of obsolescence.
BTW, would you use such an OEM board in an industrial device ? The CATS can also be used for this because of its low radio-electric emission level and its low-power requirements. It is thus the long-term investment that typical Acorn users are looking for to replace their old 10 year-old ARChimedes.
Here you also pay for the opportunity to work troublelessly and silently (no fan required) with a reliable (Strong)ARM processor.
--
Trolling using another account since 2005.
> The birth of the StrongARM once again put ARM into the performance tables, but sadly they've
> done bugger all since.
Because the StrongARM was developed/made by DEC.
DEC is gone and the StrongARM devision (patents, developers etc. but not the trademark, hehehe (wich is owned by ARM Ltd.)) was bought by Intel.
Though Intel has it all far longer than DEC now, they didn't manage to produce something faster than DEC's original 200/later 233MHz SA110 from 1996.
You have to remember that these will be initial run motherboards. They won't have the volume in place and we'll still be paying for the initial development costs.
The same will also be true of the POP PPC motherboards that should be available soon. The initial runs will be expensive.
If they can get the volumes up then the price will become more reasonable. Will they compete with AMD/ATX? Don't know but they'll certainly run cooler and consume less power.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Acorn Risc Processors are designed for embedded aplications. This ATX board is just designed for making it easier to test peripherals, etc.
The ARM was not designed for embedded applications - it was made for desktop machines (the Acorn Archimedes). But since it's so well-designed it uses very little power and has a great code density and "performance per MHz", it was able to move into the embedded niche instead of being crushed by x86 like everyone else.
The sad part is that now everyone thinks that it wouldn't make sense to put an ARM into a desktop machine. It would, if it weren't for the fact that no-one has made a high-speed version without being too concerned about power consumption.
If someone were to make an ARM that could run at 800MHz it would beat the hell out of any one of those horrible, kludgy, gigantic 8086 simulators we're all buying 'cause Windows won't run on anything else.
Intel could take the StrongARM there. But they don't. Guess why.
More likely is that you'd have to order it mail order, and thus have atrocious shipping and excise costs.
Getting Quakeforge running sounds pretty cool, but I doubt it would be economically feasible...
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.