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Matrox's Extio Reviewed
An anonymous reader writes "Looks like Matrox isn't as dead as some of us thought. This box of tricks lets you connect four displays up to a PC that's 250 meters away. All the graphic data is sent down a fiber optic cable to the Matrox box that then connects to the screens. To the end user it feels like they're working directly on the PC, but the PC can be locked away somewhere safe."
These would be so cool for demonstrations and conventions.
I wonder how many of these cards you could fit in a single computer ?
Given the matrox [[1,2],[3,4]], compute the matrox's extio.
Looks like Matrox isn't as dead as some of us thought.
When was Matrox dead ffs? When Seagate bought them, they were one of the top HDD brands (well, for commodity OEM drives, if not known for amazing quality).
The fact that half of Matrox's utilities are producing Seagate brand drives doesn't make them dead, does it.
Matrox never went away completely - they just left the consumer market. They still sell cipsets for connecting very large numbers of monitors to computers. Dual-head is nothing to them - they do eight- and even sixteen-head chipsets. They don't handle games well, but it you just want lots of displays...
This product doesn't look suited to the consumer market, either. It looks like a solution for airport terminals or something - hide away a PC with one of their multi-head video cards and use this to carry the video to where you want people to see it.
Now we got more than $1K of equipment sitting on the desk... (according to the price on the article)
I was hoping to read about a new standard monitor connection that replaces DVI (and HDMI) with fiber.
Instead Matrox has opted to move the graphics processor out of the computer, and use a (no doubt proprietary-format) optical link between the two.
The noise is a bitch and my desk is in the bedroom :( . I risk high speed pillow hit into the back of my head from my wife every so often.
... in the bed.
... in he bed, without risking notebook slipping over the edge, falling on the floor and damaging its HDD, when I fall asleep.
OTOH, price is prohibitive... that kind of money could buy me a notebook, and then I could make myself much more comfortable
OTTH, with some serious spendings I could use this thing, hang big screen above the bed and use wireless keyboard and mouse
I thought IBM did this back in 1970 with twinax. I know I did this with coax for a good 500 feet in 1998 (it was a demo at a airport). Why is this news and why would you need to do this now? Is display hardware, wireless or local fiber networking that expensive that you need to buy a 10 year old solution to solve your ill planned design?
How elegant it seems to me, sending visual information in packets of light. It reminds me of seeds of some beautiful flower which instantly sprout when planted.
I wonder, if one were to send a one minute stream of uncompressed video data, would more photons be required for the transmission over the fiber, or in the final display to the user/viewer?
Read my Very Short "Stories"
One of these, but a lot cheaper and with a DVD writer built in. No more quieting the pc or modding the case, just hide it in a closet.
"I'm not much interested in interoperability. I want substitutability. I want to be able to throw your software out."
The thing is reasonably neat. But come on, the price is ridicolous. £1299 ? That is like $2000 or something. It'd literally be cheaper to buy 2 complete laptops, ignore their internal screens, and use each of them to drive 2 external screens. $200 ? Ok. $2000 ? Completely silly.
As opposed to say putting the artists in a soundproof room, and the recording and PC gear in a control room.
Do you or your partner snore? - Visit www.snoring.com.au
There are wireless KVM (Keyboard, Video, Mouse) units that allow you to keep your computer at a distance. Just stash all your nosiy computers in one room and have the NOISY KEYBOARD AND CLICKY-CLICKY MOUSE beside a neat little KVM transceiver.
It would be nice for airport displays. A single server can drive all displays and no restrictions on video cable lengths. Apparently, it currently is one server, one video card per display. But maybe I'm mistaken.
Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
...lets me keep the box somewhere secure (esp. from burglars who now have two of PCs - hi, if your reading this on one of them), and lets me run a single 15m cable combining connectors for monitor, keyboard, dvd and a USB port. Then next time I'm burgled I just lose the peripherals rather than the box and hds.
As per parents parent, this device is more like $2000 but the point is that if the ebove advice is followed, the data is safe. This seems like a worthwhile device for medical companies or other IP-heavy industries where the data is worth millions.
It is also much smaller and neater than buying a lot of computers to do the same job. And with several computers driving a display each or something like that, you'd be hard pressed to make them behave as one desktop.
Badgers, we don't need no stinking badgers! - UHF
imagine a beowulf cluster of those...
...this is kick-ass for sound applications. You can keep a noisy eight core workstation in a separate room together with a huge drive array, and only have the interface inside your studio booth. Excellent!
Another interesting bit is that the actual graphics processor is in the Extio, not in the PC. This way rendering lag is minimized. Weird, yet cool.
.: Max Romantschuk
In Trading rooms.
Putting the physical PC out of harms way in a controlled environment and running some Fibre to the desks would reduce the cabling nightmare that you get in such places.
Just my 0.02p worth.
Matrox being dead or not dead, whatever some of us thought, at least Matrox's marketing department is able to make excellent use of the powerful /. publicity-tool "post [your product name here] as an anonymous coward".
Her vocabulary was as good as - like - whatever
If I wanted to sequester my computer in a safe place, I would use a dumb terminal.
e _monitors_with_XFree86
For multiple monitors, I would check out the following link.
http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/Using_multipl
It doesn't seem like a very exciting story to most of us.
What it wont do: For any "remote desktop" use (music studio, remote console etc), a KVM will be a far better option, as that will have mouse / keyboard and sound options in addition to graphics.
This product won't cut it for anything but a multidisplay, typical of bus terminals and airports, and dont these places already have similar technology already installed?
What it might do: The visual quality should be noticeably better than your average KVM display: the fact that matrox stuff has traditionally been very good with HQ professional static graphics display (not to be confused with 3D rendering which they suck at badly) might mean that if you plugged in some seriously kick arse HD screens to this solution, you might have the mother of all distributed HD-TV networks.
I wouldn't mind having that around the house the next time I want to watch Serenity from the tub.
And it say X Windows want its idea back.
With 4-8 display one PC with say 4 gigs of Ram, a 16 Port USB Hub and VMWare. You have 1/4-1/2 of of a computer lab running on one system. I do something simular on my Mac with Parallels and only 2 displays where I have a keyboard and a mouse hooked up via USB and I mount those USB devices into my Virtual System and have it Full Screen on an other system. So it just like having 2 systems side by side.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Now what happens in this "secure room" scenario when one of the boxes crashes? You can't just hit reset, unfortunately. Not so good.
Here's what I'm pictuing: People spend tons of money to make their computer quiet and well-cooled. But if the thing lived in the cold basement, they could bolt in cheap gigantic fans and disturb noone. But here's the kicker: The basement computer would be a multi-user system, where all the users of the household (including, for example, the living room display) would be using the same system simultaneously. Their rooms would contain displays and input devices only, wired in by fiber. Even if that happens, they're unlikely to get in each others' way, since by then these things will have at least 16 processor cores for them to share. But it means that if a single user needs to do something processor-intensive, she'll have the power of a pretty serious 16-core machine behind her, while the kids browsing myspace from the same computer (but on a different display) won't even notice.
3D GPUs are also about to go seriously multicore, and resource division on those will be easier than it is with CPUs. So if there are two gamers in the house, they could share a powerful multicore card and get acceptable performance. But if only one of them is playing, he can hog the resources of all the cores, and turn everything up to eleven.
This paradigm of the basement computing appliance could revolutionize the way hardware is made and marketed. Multisocket motherboards for the mass market could easily become common, but I'm picturing also a system of arbitrary daughterboards with extra processing units, which will speed up the system without forcing the owner to scrap things. Sure it will become a giant lego-like mess that sounds like a jet, but that's OK. It's in the basement (and will by then hopefully have sane power management which will turn off absolutely every part of every chip which isn't being used).
My point is that normal households with multiple computers today duplicate a lot of resources which go wasted, since single user has the opportunity to use them all simultaneously. The way to fix that is to pool all the household's processing into a single, big, arbitrarily extensible machine which stays out of people's way. And for that, we need a good long-run digital video over fiber standard. And maybe, with all the excess heat these things will put off, they really could double as the hot water heater!
but the PC can be locked away somewhere safe.
You misspelled that last word. It should be q-u-i-e-t.
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them. - Mark Twain
We have a friend who damaged her ear in an accident and simply can't tolerate any level of white noise or background humming. Her and her husband have gone so far as to build onto their house and concentrate all of the noisy appliances into the new section so that the rest of the house can be silent. When they visit our house, we unplug the refrigerator while they're around.
When I tell her husband about this, he will place an order within the hour. They've had a hard time getting a silent PC that's quiet enough (yes, her ear is really that damaged) but still reasonably nice, and I'm certain they'd rather have a high-end, powerful PC that can sit in the "noisy part" of the house and still be absolutely silent at her desk.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I swore off Matrox in 1995 after spending $400 on a card, all to find out there was no way to get X running in more than 16 color mode without spending several hundred more dollars on Accelerated-X licenses at the time.
This sparked my interest for the basic of data centers and keeping Industrial Operator Interfaces safe. You can put the user's keyboard/mouse anywhere you want on the plant floor and only be risking the extension device and a monitor/keyboard and mouse rather then the application and data and more importantly the access to control your plant equipment. If something happens that the floor stuff gets destroyed, just go to the nice big computer room that houses all of the computers, has redundant AC system, thick sound proof and explosion proof walls and operate from there for a time. In many plants I have worked in, individual controls rooms get redunant AC/expensive UPS systems, etc. because they house an operator interface/Data mining server class machine. These machine have to be accessible by the opreator and in the controls world, pulling across a network it not always an option due to distance and network security (Industrial Controls systems are almost always on thier own network connecting Operator Interfaces and controls equipment and get run as small networks in a local areas of the plant with no connection to a network the has internet access). I can see some more nich spots where this woudl be a great thing. I do agree with a number of the comments, I would love to see a consumer version, then I would put my PC in the corner of my basement and only I/O devices on my desk.
BY GOD !! I wanted to do that JUST this morning !! Praise the saints at matrox !!
for certain enterprise solutions. They also make a switch for their fiber kvm extenders...
http://www.thinklogical.com/products/dcs.php
Again, it would be nice if they made consumer product, but it is a niche.
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
First thing: " Work on commodity hardware?" There was no 'commodity hardware' in the seventies.
The vast majority of us aren't interested in this product. It doesn't break new ground technically. If you want to do the same thing there are other ways to do it. You can find lots of stuff on multiple screens by just googling. A dumb terminal replaces the Matrox hardware for much cheaper. In terms of maintenance, the specialized Matrox hardware exposes you worse. If it breaks, you have a delay while you obtain a new one. A dumb terminal is replaced almost immediately.
All the morons who think this is a good idea should google "KVM extender". They've been around for years.
Nope. This gadget isn't so you can "hide the PC", it's for something else. Public information displays stuff like that...
No sig today...
I support an energy trade floor and got to demo the beta of the Extio over a year ago. We currently have a mixed environment where every trader has a laptop and a blade that resides in our server room. The big plus for us with this device is it turned the laptops into 4 monitor blades because you can connect to it via an expresscard slot. I can say that the blades which push an Nvidia Quadro over cat5 is always washed out whereas the Extio looked very crisp and clear.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
*clap* *clap*
Sir, that was beautiful. True poetic genius.
You are still innocent until proven guilty. What's changed is what they do to innocent people. - notnAP, #26891325
Homer: Mmmmmm Remote Multi-Display MythTV System...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Yeah as if the laptop is going to sneeze on the servers' face
http://www.google.com/search?q=net2display
"In the Net2DisplayTM future, workers can eliminate the PC that's now on their desks and instead
have a Net2DisplayTM client. This can be as simple as a monitor with a network jack and several USB ports. The keyboard and mouse can connect directly to the display, as can any other local peripheral, such as a printer. The server runs all the applications sending data to the remote display over the network using TCP/IP."
Does anyone know if I can play EQ2 on one of these bad boys? Anyone know if any games like EQ2/WoW will run on multiple displays? Are there any games out there that can do this? 4x4 Minesweeper FTW! lolz...
-50 DKP for lame post!
...with SGI machines. I have no idea what tech they were using (I worked in the Ince buildings next door, but got to tour the datacenter and production floors once), but each designer had two SGI boxes linked with some Cray-sourced technology. Both machines were rackmounted in a block-long data center. Out on the production floor, all that was on the desks was a keyboard, mouse, screen, and a pod into which you could hook up speakers or headphones. Totally silent production floor, all the noisy fans, heat issues, etc., were in the data center. Fiber optics running along the (exposed) ceiling supplied the I/O. Pretty trick in '01.
geek. lawyer.
Another good use for these -- clean rooms. I work in the pharma industry, and always cringe when I see a PC in a clean room. You've got a fan pushing air through the insides of a dust-collecting box, that you can't spray down with disinfectant to decontaminate.
With one of these, you've still got the keyboard/monitor, but you can get sealed keyboards and LCD monitors fairly easily, while sealed PCs are a lot harder to come by.
Virtually all "media other than USB" can be connected via USB, so I don't see a big problem.
While external DVD+-R drives are in the $60-70 range right now (compared to $30-40 for internal), there's no reason why they couldn't drop to be just a dollar or two more than an internal drive if demand increased, since there's not a whole lot of extra hardware necessary. Readers for many other types of media (especially flash cards) are only just now being built in to computers, and are more commonly used in readers attached via USB. To put it another way, which would you rather have: A computer with USB as the only means of input/output, or a computer with no USB and only current standard media/connectors (setting aside video, sound, and keyboard/mouse, which the Extio covers)? I think you'd find that after a few years, the USB-only machine would be far better suited to taking advantage of new technologies and present far fewer limitations.
G
I can login to my home machine in California, while I am working in India. The quality of the graphics is limited only by the speed of the network.
What do I win ?
A while back, I had a requirement were having 3 to 5 monitors up showing data, analysis, and results all LIVE would speed up results. Matrox looked like the product that would do the job. I looked at the Matrox solution, and found my bank account wanting. So I looked at what Debian/Knoppix/Ubuntu offered. The result is a multi-monitor graphics machine for the price of a single Matrox card; Good product, I just can not afford it.
I guess that means optical isnt going the way of the dodo? yay wireless!! what ever happened to the wireless hdmi...
Can't compete on what grounds -- absolute performance?
Even in the G450 days (I have one of those in an old box here!), they never (IIRC) had the absolute highest performance. But they were reasonably priced, and had solid free drivers.
Today, my Linux box has Intel X3000 graphics. Again, not great performance on an absolute scale, but plenty fast enough for me, and not expensive, and solid free drivers.
It's sad because they totally 0wned the "non-{high-end-gaming/CAD} Linux user" market, and then gave it away, by keeping programming info secret, and for no apparent reason. There wasn't a good successor for a while -- ATI and NVidia kind of split it for a while. Now Linux geeks seem to be going ape-shit over Intel graphics.
It's sad because it looks like they thought they were competing with ATI and NVidia, when in fact they had carved out their own niche. Then they abandoned this niche, which was kind of empty until Intel walked in with a solid product.
It's also sad because "techie Linux geeks" are a niche with significance out of proportion to their number. (How many Linux geeks are the Buyer's Guide for their families?) Apple is pretty darned independent, but they at least recognize that Mac OS X owns a big chunk of the "Unix geek" niche right now, and aren't going out of their way to piss them off (with Mac OS X, at least). If I had a company that Linux geeks loved, I would try to use that, not destroy it.
... almost fooled me.
If the answer is war, you are asking the wrong question