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A Motherboard That Doesn't Require An OS
An anonymous reader submits a link to this review of "motherboard that allows access to your multimedia devices via a special BIOS. No operating system required! Good for a home entertainment PC I guess." The review says that it will come bundled with a TV tuner card, too.
At what point does a bios become an operating system in and of itself. Seems like all the features this thing has will require more than just basic input/output.
"Come on, let's go drink till we can't feel feelings anymore."
But isn't this just a motherboard with its OS embedded in the 'bios'? Sort of one of those things I'd been expecting to see, but always figured it would be ushered in as a DRM requirement. ;-)
Quack, quack.
Now that's my kind of mini-PC and it uses an AMD processor! :)
This space is not for rent.
The shame with that system is that its expencive (250 for board + case) and it crashes a lot acording to other reviews.
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
So... It enable you to use your devices without booting your os ? So basicly you can get things running up as quickly as a tv set if your computer was powered off, and that's all ?
BTW, is this feature useless if you computer is already powered up ?
But it's pretty cool to see it is possible!
Please correct me if i said anything stupid !
This link shows Linux on a chip.
Maybe you're referring to the HP 95LX... A palmtop from 1991.
You can check out the details at:
http://www.daniel-hertrich.de/95lx/
about 12 years ago when I told people that I wanted to learn Assembler (or Assembly as most people insist), most folks I spoke with declared I was foolish. (which was largely true)
;-)
Now bringing home about twice the bacon those same folks did, writing BIOS code, I just smile.
And as you see, we got the world by the bawls, us BIOS guys!
(seriously though, I think the BIOS is a piece of legacy crap that we need to get rid off... too bad it pays my bills)
The BIOS does functions that you can't have a general purpose OS do. For example, each BIOS is custom tailored to the MB it's connected to. It helps define signal timing, memory addressing, voltage monitoring...etc. Operating systems today do not completely override these functions. What they WILL do is allow for better allocation of resources to hardware directly such as what IRQ will be tied to what type of hardware.
Life is not for the lazy.
It was called "air construction architecture". Back in 8-bit era, I have seen a home made TRS-80 (Video Genie) clone machine, completely built out of components arranged in 3d with glue and wooden sticks and connected by plain LCUA wire, without any board. Of course, it was running NEWDOS-80, TRSDOS, LDOS and CP/M operating systems from 8'' floppy without any problems. This windy design has no problems with heat dissipation from Eastern-Germany made Z-80 CPU clone and Soviet Union made 16kx1 RAM chips anymore, unlike a board version had.
It is even possible on today's platforms, just take some PXA arm processor, wire some flash and ram chips to it, connect some ancient terminal to serial and alas, you have a linux machine.
There you are, staring at me again.
It's useful in bypassing DRM (hopefully).
Alas, Babylon.
Lets see, it brings up the system from power off, and manages its resources...
That sounds like an OS..
So its in rom.. so what? Most embedded devices are that way...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Good point. Just as a reminder to those of us my age, CP/M stood for Control Program for Microprocessors. It's interesting becuase it doesn't pretend to have everything and the kitchen sink like a Web Browser, media player, CD burner, instant messenger, *cough*Windows*cough*. It's just a program for controlling the hardware.
My 3 year old toshiba laptop allows you to play audio off the memory card and cdrom with external play/next/last/stop buttons. It only requires a bootup of the os if you want to play dvds. I guess they went a step futher and allowed you to play a dvd, I cannot get to the site now to see :).
A new platform will have to be conconcted to house all the shit sound/video/ethernet cards you suckers are using now. With some "BIOS" implementation that'll be just as bad, or worse, if that's possible.
Floppy disk sales will plummet, what with firmware being built-into cards, and people being able to netboot their PC's, or EVEN BOOT OFF THE SECOND HARD DISK. Imagine that.
Windows XP2 will only boot from said "BIOS", OpenFirmware x86 will never be MS supported. Ugh, it says it's "open".
OpenBoot is a trademark of Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Considering that QNX has a 1.44MB bootable demo floppy that has:-
1 A live OS
2 A file system (that I think maybe even now has read/write drivers for QNX's 2 file systems & all the FAT derivitives, plus read-only NTFS support)
3 A very elegant colour graphical enviroment/GUI (that beats the crap out of X-Windows & all the layered crudge now normally ontop of it)
4 Networking capabilities (including drivers for common NICs & dial-up modems)
& 5 a web browser (that even I think now supports a ported Shockwave/Flash plugin, if there's a HDD in the system with the required space formated with a supported file system).
Now even though there's obviously a RAM drive thing going on here, there's no reason why moderm BIOSes can't do the same thing, especially considering contemporary flash RAM sizes mean many BIOSes are to a good degree spare space. From what I remember someone posting here on Slashdot, when this or a very similar topic was previously posted (seems like yonks ago now), some PC flash RAM BIOSes are more than half empty, leading to this potential being investigated, simply as a by-product of finding something productive to do with the left over bytes on the BIOS's flash memory.
I really like the concept of a multimedia oriented motherboard.
And, if it wasn't for the fact that I have a modded X-Box that I paid $125 that, for the most part, does all of this except for tv tuning and has the added advantage of playing X-Box games as well. By the time I build this mobo into a case, it's gonna be the same size as an X-Box too...
The review hit the nail on the head, though. If they did the same thing, but made it micro-ATX and threw on on-board wifi, people would jump on it. I know I'm looking for a small multimedia hub for the bedroom. Heck, I don't even want to put a hard drive in it. I just want a shell that will pull stuff off my main PC.
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."