More Information on Total mPOWER?

Bingo Foo asks: "Many moons ago, I saw an article on some pretty neato sounding PowerPC daughterboards made to work with Intel Linux. To this day, I have yet to see a review of them (Say it ain't so, Ars...), or even a reasonably detailed explanation of how the cross-compiling and job execution work. In a somewhat exhaustive Web search, I found more questions and speculation than answers. All of the specific applications mentioned are rendering and other 'dumb' SIMD processes. It's difficult to tell just how versatile these boards might be. Has anyone shelled out the $6k for one of these things and are they willing to share their experiences with the rest of the world? In particular, I wonder if this might come in handy for some Monte Carlo codes that we run where I work, where raw flops are more important than communication or memory, and the parallelism is MIMD."

"Just an explanation of the programming/compiling/execution process would be nice, and inquiries sent to the manufacturer have resulted in sales-type replies which weren't technically helpful."

Comments

Re:medal requested for fp

[morbid]

What are you smoking?

I've been looking for these boards for a while. I remeber seeing them on /. a while back.
They sounded very interesting. I thought it might just have been a hoax like some other multi-processor bords featured on /.

Many years ago I remember that Microway used to do add-in boards for PC's for doing intensive stuff. They once made a Transputer board, and later on an i860 and then an i960 board with optimising compilers.

Just imagine if, instead of just a 3D accelerator card, you could also for $100 get a high-speed 64-bit risc on a board to accelerate your games etc. I bet they'd sell like hot-cakes in university physics departments and the like where people need to do a lot of FP.

Amiga

[semaj]

These sound a lot like the PowerPC boards that have been used to keep the Amiga alive (well, almost) after the 680x0 chips became old news.

There's a load of links at http://www.suite101.com/linkcat egory.cfm/amiga/4027 if any one's interested.

Basically, the system libraries are all replaced with versions that use the PowerPC for anything remotely complicated, while any older programs just go on using the original processor.

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