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AMD / Intel Hybrid Motherboard
batgirl writes "ECS has taken advantage of their recent merger with PC Chips and released an interesting take on motherboards. Using the highly portable SiS chipsets, they were able to create a motherboard that supports all kinds of processors across all platforms. The PF88 starts as an Intel socket 775 motherboard, but different expansion cards can be purchased to add support for everything from a Socket 939 Athlon64 to a Socket 479 Pentium-M. The price is right, and performance is as good as can be expected. But how many people would make use of this?"
I generally find that by the time upgrading the CPU is cost effective, a new motherboard makes sense as part of the package. YMMV
Everybody's a libertarian 'till their neighbour's becomes a crack house.
How good would the OS support be with this? Could an operating system be installed with multiple chipset support?
Nobody.
Chicken fried butter sticks? Do
Same people who put new engines in their VW Bugs. If the rest of the car is still good, then just upgrade the engine to keep up with the times.
This has been done before, and even today you can buy adapters to get next-generation CPU's working on older motherboards. However, most of these hybrids have to make trade-offs that do not benefit the end-user. It would benefit ECS for economy of scale, but end-users would always be stuck with proprietary expansion modules that may or may not be available anymore by the time they want to change CPU.
IMO you're better off selecting the mobo+CPU that fits your needs today, and by the time you need to upgrade just select a new mobo+CPU du jour..
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
Can I drive it in carpool lanes though?
really 867993
Karma schkarma
But only if the Intel and AMD chips that provided the features I want were close to the same price. By the time that I needed a new proc, though, I would probably want a new mobo to take advantage of 6 months to a year of new development.
Meh, a real sig would take too long, and I have an MMORPG to play with....
Despite eveyone talking smack, I can see this being a valuable benchmark board. How well do these CPU/Chipset combos work? How well does this ATI card do with an AMD CPU? Okay now how about an Intel CPU? It's not a new idea to expand the CPU, but doing it across vendors like this is interesting.
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
The article summarized this idea well by calling it "a solution without a problem". The whole thing is just so amazingly ill-considered that it's very hard to take it seriously. The only need I could see for something like this is if someone with a P4 needed PCI-E now, and _also_ knew that they wanted to go AMD later. Even then, would they put up with buying a $50 expansion board and running their expensive new processor on that hacked solution?? If PCChips/ECS want to be ambitious, why not endeavor to bring affordable SMP to the masses? Even if the server-classed chips required are expensive, many people must be put off by $300, server-oriented mainboards. This way, they could grab some serious attention in the high-end market and gain credibility. What they're doing now is only going to leave people scratching their heads...
Forget that it can handle all those processors. Look at all the pretty colors.
Maybe it was built by unicorns....
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
I generally find that by the time upgrading the CPU is cost effective, a new motherboard makes sense as part of the package. YMMV
If this company has done it's job right, this should reduce the overall cost of the board. If vendors have to keep fewer types of boards around then they are buying fewer types, giving them a price break. By having one mainboard that is common to all daughterboards, the total cost of delivering the motherboard is cheaper (one hopes).
My two cents.
postmodernsideshow.com
Is like partitioning the hard drive to have your two favourite operating systems in the same machine.
Untill there will be a way to have both of them running my programs at the same time (hybrid SMP), that solution would look like a trick.
Users that are concerned with CPUs and chipsets would like to have the real best, not the best of breeds.
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
If this company has done it's job right, this should reduce the overall cost of the board.
I don't know what kind of reputation PCCHIPS and SiS have now, but I have 2 500Mhz PCCHIPS motherboards and, I believe, SiS chips for integrated extras like sound. Working with them, under Windows or Linux, was such a horrid experience, it'll take years of hearing every geek I meet telling me their work is great before I ever try anything with either of those names on it again. I remember having problems trying 3rd party parallel cables with their boards and not getting anything to work. When I Googled for info, I found that I was just one of many people with that same problem. I spent 3-5 years developing a unique software system on computers using their boards. Once I got Linux running, I stopped upgrading all packages because those boards are so flakey.
Twice bitten, everafterwards shy.
I'm not buying anything from PC Chips, ever. Anyone else remember when they were making 486 boards with fake L2 cache? Yes, FAKE CACHE. The cache chips were empty, and the board had a modified BIOS that reported whatever cache size the motherboard was jumpered for.
Screw this company, even if it has somehow evolved.
hello dear sirs my name is jamesh i are india (bihar) can u guide me install red had linux 9?
On the one hand, the technology could develop into something very cool. If you could use multiple cards and have a separate, different proc running on each one, it could be the coolest multiprocessor system around. Or simply using the motherboard as support for separate running systems in a system-on-a-card configuration (these are already available, but expensive). It currently could be a very useful little test bed if someone wanted to check performance across different processors. It could also be useful for large system builders like Dell who could simplify their parts management and support costs by having one motherboard used across all of their lineup.
That having been said, there is a lot on a motherboard that gets upgraded each generation: RAM style, upgrade card slots, video card slots, small device connectivity, HD connections, bus... I would guess that these are ultimately more important to the overall speed of the system than the processor. Can you imagine hamstringing an Athalon 64 with a 66mhz bus and an AGPx1 graphics card? I doubt this will ultimately be beneficial to the end consumer... they might get one upgrade generation for a nice little last speed boost, but as the motherboard needs to support more than just a processor, upgrading just a processor isn't as much help as it could be.
The ______ Agenda
After driving for several winters in Minnesota, I've found that by the time an engine is ready to call it quits, I can just put my fee through the floor and drive around Flintstone style.
I saw these ECS boards at least 3 months ago....
plus: Who wants a board by ECS? They are my stereotype for crappy boards....
Burn me once, shame on you. Burn me twice, shame on me.
It would be useful to PC manufactures who are looking to cut costs while still offering both AMD and Intel processors to their customers. Then they could order one huge lot of the same motherboard, therefore getting a greater bulk discount.
I am reading this article on an mobile sempron powered laptop which is built on the sis chipset SiS-M760GX.
:).
Can't really say that anything is really bad over here, i know the sis graphics sucks, but since this is a work laptop and no gaming machine it doesnt really matter (i knew the lack of graphic performance on purchase already, there had to be something that made this thing that cheap
Other than that, it works just ok, no weird "sis bugs" anywhere to see, the sound is ok for a laptop (even in cpu up/down throttling situations mplayer plays without glitches). I run Ubuntu 5.04 here, kernerl 2.6.12-5. Rock solid (i'm lying now, i crashed once, but that was a ndiswrapper bug). writing a cd or dvd with the dual layer dvd writer doesnt suck the whole perfomance out of the machine (old sis chipsets had serious concurrency issues), usb bus seems ok, and the broadcom wifi works also fine (i'm currently in my bed watching the chine F1 grand prix).
However, from the past i must agree with you that i have seen some veeeryy bad chipsets from sis and pcchips too. But recently sis has evolved pretty well and still maintained the keep the prices low.
I wish SiS would be more linux friendly and release a graphics driver or the specifications for their sis760 integrated graphics chip. the 3000+ cpu on my laptop can make compensations for the usual graphics stuff instead of the chip own features but the 3d performance is just slow as hell since the dri project of linux cant handle this chip yet (whereas under windows i can run enemy territory and colin mcrae rally 3).
I'd tell you the chances of this story being a dupe, but you wouldn't like it.
...this board allowed you to use AMD and Intel CPUs at the same time...
Ditto on this for me as well. One PCChips (later coined PCShits) that I had for a Duron 600 was a nightmare. Two friends also got the same board and their experiences were none the better. After two years of BIOS updates, I finally had something that seemed stable, but I was wary of touching it. It was a releif once it stablized since I built the system for my parents and I got calls every few days tell me what the blue screen was saying this time.
I do have a more recent PCChips board, and it is not as bad. A merger with ECS doesn't bolster my confidence in them, though my experience with ECS is limited.
For now I stick to the mid-range Asus, Abit and BioStars and have had good luck.
Upgradable, budget boards that will support a wide range of CPUs and memory would be useful in urban elementary and secondary schools where money for technology is limited, especially when administration considers 7-year old iMacs cutting-edge.
With Intel-based Windows/MacOSX dual-boot computers on their way to the masses, the ability to cheaply upgrade certain hardware to extend the life of these systems would be welcome. It would take years anyway for school officials to adapt (e.g., NYC Dept of Ed has a deal with Dell), but the future of the technology is interesting.
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By the time I get around to upgrading to a new CPU, a new motherboard (and RAM) is required. I have never taken advantage of generic sockets/slots. If you are going to buy an Athlon 64, why not just buy a MB that specifically supports only it? My only guess is that ECS is just trying to cater to poential buyers with various different preferences for CPUs. I doubt that they expect many people will actually take advantage of the flexability. It is probably cheaper to manufacture a single design that will support many CPUs than to make boards that specialize in specific CPUs.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
Ah yes, but when you upgrade from, say, an Athlon XP to a P4EE, how much is it going to cost you to get yourself a new 'SIMA' board?
Buy bulk in motherboards that will support both.
No dead stock you can't shift anymore.
Regardless of the performance, the words "AMD" or "Intel" is enough to sell things to most of the Joe public...
smash.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
This reminds me of my old ALR 386. The processor was on a card, with the idea that you didn't need to replace the motherboard to upgrade, only the CPU card.
When I wanted to upgrade to a 486, the CPU card cost more than a new motherboard, CPU, and RAM.
There are two problems with the CPU card approach. The first is technical; new generations of processors are coupled with new generations of chip sets, and often, new RAM technology.
The second problem is economic; without a CPU card standard, you are locked into a specific vendor for upgrades. The vendor has no incentive to price the upgrade any less than just below replacement cost for the entire MB, CPU, and RAM package.
If this system had come out not too long ago, you'd be locked into PATA instead of SATA, slow RAM, and AGP instead of PCIe graphics. The CPU and MB should always be treated as a unit, and sufficient RAM should be purchased from the beginning, so memory upgrades should be fairly unusual. Graphics card, hard drive, and optical drive upgrades may make sense; not always, not for everyone, but often enough to consider.
AMD / Intel Hybrid Motherboard, eh? So what, it gets awesome gas mileage or something?
The latency WILL suck.. OMFG! MODULAR???
I was doing packaging arch builds on x86 and x86_64 EM64T and ponder if it could be easier to have two types of processor on same board for regression testing and QA. Since cross compile is just a pain in the ass, it would be some what useful if I could flip a BIOS setting to switch between Intel P4 and AMD64 without swapping parts.
For my purpose, I think, if there was a BIOS flip switch, it would have been worth investment. However there isn't (if I'm wrong on this, correction is welcome), so it's just a fancy board with swappable processor which is fairly easy with any ATX casing with swappable motherboard plane without unscrewing bolts and wire works if such thing exists.
"Don't let fools fool you. They are the clever ones."
As I recall it was PC chips who produced the fake cache on the 486 motherboards. Look here:
http://www.redhill.net.au/b/b-bad.html "PC Chips fake cache 486"
I do have an ecs board but it was before the merger. It was stable for years.
nevertheless - there are reputable manufacturers out their so why would I care about ECS/PC CHIPS?
As a side note I found a great place to work where things like this are out of the question. We buy top of the line parts for our devices and compromise nothing but our own effort to further the business.
You are about to give someone a piece of your mind, something which you can ill afford...
I don't know if anyone else here has had experience with ECS boards, but they suck. Sure maybe they perform decently right now, but what good is that when the board is dead in 6 months. ECS, and PC Chips for that matter, will never be a company i purchase from in the future, no matter how innovative their products become.
-Psy
Darn, and I was hoping I could have both CPUs at the same time and call it a Pentathlon. :-)
Support Apple G5 processors ? And both G5 and Intel or AMD on the same board ? And i could by hitting a switch tranfer to my Mac and Whatever :P ... that would be yumm.. and and and...
now all we need is a dual processor motherboard that can support 1 intel and 1 amd processor at the same time.
Compaq used same approach in:
The only cheap and working solutions were the cpu converter sockets, f.ex. from a Pentium II slot to Pentium III socket.
Now that would be cool, if I could put a G4 or XScale in it.
But what the poster really meant is probably "all kinds of x86 CPUs".
Duh.
You'd expect them to cover it up a bit more, sheesh!
Will wank off Linus Torvalds for fame.
For people who want to make multiple optimized kernels for distribution while using only one PC.
But not useful enough to justify the purchase. I do this, but I use separate PCs, and will continue to.
Now their motherboards can suck twice as much as before.
-- This sig for rent.
I don't see why OEM's would stock these when the single-arch boards are cheaper, but one purpose I did imagine long ago when these were first announced, was for a test bench. As a PC technician I often had to put together testing rigs for four different chipsets: Intel s478, lga775, AMD Athlon/Sempron and finally an Athlon64 s939 (we were never too heavy on Socket 754). Having a single board that can take all CPU's using adapters would be great for people like me, just have one system ready to go, and swap the CPU whenever you need to test something. Running all processors on the same board means I can keep an OS installed with bench/test software. No driver shuffling, reliable networking... it would be awesome!
-Billco, Fnarg.com
I think I can answer that question for them. Note
Ok maybe none is a little harsh. There are always some people that will shell out for gimmicks and the like. I have to admit that I once bought a motherboard from PC Chips and it was the biggest pile of steaming faeces that I have ever seen. The first board was DOA the replacement failed after about 15 minutes the replacement for that managed a whole day before catching alight. I asked for my money back and bought a better board.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
Interesting. If your laptop is an Acer Aspire 3003, then I considered getting it, but went with a different one, simply because of the bad linux support I'd read about. If there had been linux drivers for the SiS graphics and the broadcom WiFi, then I'd probably have got it. I know you can use ndiswrapper for the wifi, but kismet doesn't like that.
43rd Law of Computing:
Anything that can go wr
fortune: Segmentation violation -- Core Dumped
I had some bad experiences with sis chipsets, on asrock motherboards for socket a AMD and for socket 478 for intel. Running FreeBSD. Avoid like the plague, especially if you use freebsd. Most annoying problem was that activating the serial port killed the network connection.
J.C. Pizarro
I've worked at one of those mass-producing OEM places for a while and all of our low-end spec machines were using ECS boards so I got to tinker with just about every of their models at least a few hundred times...
I've never seen mobos with so many issues. While some models were worse than others, in general one out of 10 mobos from ECS was DOA and an average of one per five came back as RMA within a month. One of the weirdest issues was with some ECS-P4VMM2 which would get a ghost mouse cursor in the upper left corner of the screen after a few months if you used an AGP card with it (using the board's VGA-out was fine though).
What ECS doesn't get in quality, they make up for with gimmicks just like this new idea. Personally, I wouldn't touch any of their products with a ten-foot pole now.
The problem with these kind of universal component concepts is that in the real world, unless all of the adapters are included as standard, then finding and gettings them (adapters) is uncertain and a pain. They are always comparatively pricey, and in the end the specific CPU motherboards are a better value. It's not as if your not sure what CPU your going to be using when you purchase them. CPU's ain't batteries.
I attempt to build persnal computers for my friends and others through " word of mouth" and I believe could be beneficial. In addition building systems, I also fix'em. Well, if I had a board that supported two processors I could then test these processors on the same board to discover if they were 'bad'. This could cut down on having so many extra "testing" systems around the shop. I don't really know how beneficial this is, but it is an idea. On the other hand, can't recall the last time I had good endeavor with ECS...
>I generally find that by the time upgrading the CPU is cost effective,
>a new motherboard makes sense as part of the package. YMMV
I generally find that by the time upgrading intelligent life is cost effective,
a new universe makes sense as part of the package. YHWH
Worse, putting my economist hat on, the only people that this makes sense for are the manufacturer and a few OEM's that may be crazy enough to go for this design. None of the top OEM's I know of would even consider it. Any who would have poor reputations from what I've been able to discern historically. Someone may surprise me and come up with an economic justification here aside from those two considerations, but I haven't seen it in the threads so far.
Nothing to see here. Move on.
"[I]t is a wise man who admits the limits of his knowledge or skill, and that pretending either causes harm." --Terry Go
Damn... CowboyNeal is hung.
I've stated this elsewhere in the thread, but I work for a local PC shop, and deal with a good number of both ECS and PC Chips boards. ECS definitely makes the better boards of the two (especially within the last year. The KN1 line of motherboards are absolutely great to work with), but for the most part, PC Chips boards are OK. Nothing phenomenal, but we've not had any real problems with them either. They serve their role as a cheap, 'good enough' board just fine for the people that are looking for that.
The other brands you mention are fine as well. I've had great luck with BioStar (used two of their boards in my personal machines for several years), my experience with Abit has been a bit mixed, and Asus boards are solid, but I find they tend to be overpriced compared to similar boards from other "top tier" manufacturers. IE: The A8N-E in the system I'm typing this on has fewer features and a poorer layout than boards that cost $15-20 less from makes like Gigabyte, ABit, even MSI (who I find are even more overpriced) etc.
Either way, I'm definitely a big believer in going with what works well for you, just thought I'd give my opinion as someone who deals with a bit more volume than most slashdotters do.
1. Dell will use this mobo (+ P4 ofc)
2. Dell will advertise it
3. Dell will bolt the cases shut -_-'
In 5 years, I have taken 1 asus board in for warranty. I can't say that about these two companies. It's kinda like when HP bought comtrash.. GREAT! Now one company has all the worst systems in one place.
This all in one idea is really bad.. for the reasons some of the previous posters have said.
I'm not anti-social, I'm anti-idiot.
Buy a new CPU - free mobo, problem solved!
It's a headache, but I got wifi working in Ubuntu 5.10 running the Linux kernel 2.6.12-8-386 on my Acer Aspire 3002 using Ndiswrapper. It works pretty well The major problem is that newer kernels don't seem to do so hot with it; when I upgraded to 2.6.12-9-386, the power management module stopped working, and I had to revert to the older kernel to get it back. A couple of others have reported success. See here for a thread about it, and here for my wiki documenting my efforts to get it to work.
Seems to me like an enjoyful company in Denmark designed this board (Lego).
... but your post reminds me of George Costanza's FAKE Christmas donation to his boss, Kruger.
Where's the G5 PPC cpu card?
A huge problem I have always had with running an AMD CPU is that the motherboards suck. The chipsets suck, the BIOS' sucks, the boards just suck all around. Even high-end stuff like the Opteron machine I'm typing this on sucks. The CPU's are great but everything that makes it run sucks. Part of the problem is because of the manufacturers and part of the problem is that there are just no good chipsets avaiable. The few AMD chipsets that exist seem to be pretty good but AFAIK there are no AMD disk controllers, USB controllers, and other important stuff.
Intel on the other hand has much superior chipsets (although not so good CPU's at the moment). They are not without problems but better than the stuff you can get for AMD.
My perfect motherboard would be a dual Socket-940 Opteron board that ran a high-end Intel chipset. It wouldn't use the Intel memory controller since the AMD CPU's have built-in controllers but everything else (disk, USB, PCI-e, etc.) would be using the superior Intel stuff.
I would probably just run an Intel system if Intel had something better than the hot, power-sucking, slow Prescott crap.
The ratio of people to cake is too big
ECS/PC Chips is the only motherboard manufacturer i have ever come across that had multiple occurences of Electrolytic capacitors leaking their electrolyte, split and burst ends... the quality of the components on the board are what make a good board... I wouldnt touch these boards if they were the last motherboard available on the planet.
If they went for a little better standardization, this might just work.
It's ridiculous that you have to have a P4 socket and Northbridge even if you want to run an AMD processor -- they're wasting $20, at least, that will blow them out of the budget market. And that's the only market they've got, since the enthusiasts are going to buy they latest and greatest each time.
If you really want to do this, create a line of mini-motherboards that contain Northbridge, RAM, CPU socket, x16 graphics slot and an x4 slot, for each processor architecture they want to support. Then make a daughterboard that fits the x4, and contains everything else (say an x1, PATA, SATA, audio, network, PCI, whatever).
No wasted parts, and if you do it right there's even a standard -- someone else could make just the daughterboard (say with better audio) or just the CPU side (say to support a transmeta chip, or whatever).
PC Chips is so ashamed of its own products that they don't even mark their boards with their name or a model number. Support for them is almost non-existent, and trying to get them to work with anything even slightly abnormal is hopeless. Fuck it until another manufacturer with better products steps up to the plate and makes something like this.
Until NVidia's K8/Opteron boards came out the SiS based solutions were by far the most reliable since the other alternative (VIA) was just pure crud.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Dang, I thought maybe they had produced a dual-processor board that would support an Intel and and AMD processor at the same time. THAT would be impressive.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
yep it's the 3003wlci, wide screen rocks. ... so go figure ... single app. benchmarks may tell one story, but if several apps run and media player under the m$ windows needs 2x the cpu power to playback mp3-s and movies (while not throttling the cpu) with pentium-m then there's something definetly wrong with intel.
/etc/network/interfaces so bringing up the wifi is as hard for me as typing sudo ifup wlan0 , that's it. dunno about that kismet dong. i dont like gui stuff.
:D.
and as for the performance of the cpu, it kicked the ass in real life tests when compared to pentium-m 1.7
i use the broadcom wifi device with ndiswrapper, i use ubuntu and have properly configured my
the sis graphics does work with x , i even get the secondary output to work. the only thing that i dont have is dri and therefor the opengl stuff isn't accelerated by hardware. other than that the graphics is fine and when i watch movies with mplayer, the cpu usually chills at 800mhz and shows 10-30% usage of this 800mhz
so it's pretty decent if you want to work with it. only thing that was weird was that i had to use irq=noacpi or smth that on my linux boot line, otherwise the damn linux kernel messes up the ethernet device while booting up (acer bios is still buggy, even with some patches, so dont let it mangle the irq-s).
ofcourse if you want a gaming device, look in the ferrari direction.
I'd tell you the chances of this story being a dupe, but you wouldn't like it.
Three of the IT industries most infamous companies pairing on this project, I be treating the relability of this product with contempt if these companies failure records are anything to go by especially PC-Chips.
I owned a PCChips motherboard once, back in the days when the Pentium166 was about a mid-range computer. Horrible beast. I think i had to underclock the CPU and FSB to make it work reliably, and the IDE BMDMA drivers for windows didn't really exist, and enabling DMA under linux caused corruption that was undetected by the drivers. I only detected it by copying large files around and comparing them. My filesystem was hosed many times until I figured out what was causing it and turned DMA off.
Also, I think (although I may be wrong, it was quite a while ago) that PCChips were the ones who put fake L2 cache chips on the motherboard. They looked like cache but were in fact not.