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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...
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.
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
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
RAMBUS royalties are a tiny percentage. Most consumers won't even know the difference; RAMBUS is counting on volume (almsot every new Intel motherboard uses SDRAM or RDRAM) to make them money.
So your answer is yes, they will have to pay royalties, but not, it won't make it that much more expensive.
Friends don't let friends misuse the subjunctive.
I thought RAMBUS claimed their patent covered ANY synchronous DRAM access from a processor.
:)
Maybe they did. But the 'S' in SDRAM stands for 'Super'. See, it's SuperDynamic RAM. It was probably named in Japan
We don't know how bad things are in north korea, but here are some pictures of hungry children. -- CNN
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Remind me when was the last time you installed Analog modem in Linux?? do you think that PCI based modems are as easy as ISA modems? they're not. most of them are Winmodems (so the lucent linux driver won't work - it's ARM, not X86), so you'll need an ISA modem..
Hetz (Heunique)
Well, just about anything is possible with enough 9 volt batteries. At my last job, we have a whole barrel full of semi-discharged 9 volt batteries. I plugged them criss-cross until I had about a hundred in series.
Then I wanted to see what kind of an arc it would draw. Boy was that an experience. 900 volts with several amperes (peak) behind it is a formidable force. Probably enough to electrocute an Elephant.
Don't try it at home, boys and girls.
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.
Already thought of:
http://www.dnaco.net/~kragen//sa-beowulf/
I don't know the current status of it, but both Chalice and Simtec were working on it.
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
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.
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.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
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
>Is that the only real reason?????
;-).
:-)
No... cheap printer ports, serial ports, network cards, and other items sold at computer sales/garage sales are usually in ISA form. Really, an ISA printer port, 10 BT network card, or serial port isn't going to be any slower than a PCI version. Also, ISA soundcards are dirt cheap (again, at sales), and run just fine.
Also, you can usually get a CGA/TTL monitor for free including card from lots of people. All those cards are ISA. For a cheap server, these are a fine choice, since running X on a server is a waste (not that X won't work on a hercules graphics adapter...
And then there's all that legacy hardware -- Bus mouse controllers, proprietary UPS controllers, proprietary scanner I/F boards, radio boards, arcnet cards, network cards with specially burned EEPROMS, etc, etc...
"Why buy more hardware just because it has a new bus if it offers no other immediate benefit to you?" is the way I look at it. Some people prefer the "But it has more crap that I don't need on it so I want it" approach...
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
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
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.
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.
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.