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."

Comments

Compatibility

[Grimwiz]

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.

ARM eh...

[delmoi]

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.

Re:Please pardon my ignorance, but

[Christopher Thomas]

I don't know much about the ARM family of processors. How does a 233mhz ARM compare to, for example, a 233mhz Pentium II?

The ARM will burn far less power, will (probably) be comparable for integer operations, but will be much, much worse at floating-point (earlier versions didn't have a FPU; that might or might not still be the case).

ARM chips are targetted at embedded integer applications and things like PDAs that require low power and don't require strong floating-point performance.

They're not that cheap

[[Xorian]]

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.

Too Expensive, Too Late...

[Christopher B. Brown]

I might build one "on a whim" if I could get mobo and CPU for $150.

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."

Details on the THREE year old CATS board

[Krisg]

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...

Great for development.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

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".