Slashdot Mirror
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)
Facebook is the new AOL
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"
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
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
Instead of forking over 1200 quid for the card, take 300 of those to get a good card and use the other 900 (or less) to make the computer silent. It is possible to create a computer that doesn't generate much (audible) noise. You gotta take the right components (like, avoid those CPU fans that resemble starting jets), and you might have to make a few compromises, but it's quite possible. And it needn't mean you're taking a slower machine.
Just make sure you connect that power led. I forgot it, and that's a serious problem with my crate. I don't hear whether it's on or off...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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
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!
THe bandwidth of this unit far exceeds anything you could do with wireless - four 1920x1200 digital displays, keyboard, mouse, audio, and USB ports over fiber...
This unit is designed and PERFECT for financial "turrets" where traders have up to four screens on their desk at one time... This solution allows them to get the computer hardware out of the turret, allowing them to pack more traders in a given space.
This isn't for the home market, even the home "enthusiast" market, nor even the insane, "gotta have it" home market - this is for certain users with very specific needs where cost isn't really an object...
As for the price, this unit includes the four port video card, that helps explain some of the cost (for example this Matrox card is $750 and provides 4 video outputs...
Ken
Exactly - even though this only displaces a single PC, you can make that PC quite powerful, and even a 1U rackmount server ot blade (with requisite PCIe 1x slot available) could provide a very dense solution. If a blade dies, move the fiber connection to a live blade, and you're back up in minutes.
Ken
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?
Exactly my point. You had to pony up some series cash to get into such a system back then.
You can find lots of stuff on multiple screens by just googling.Multiple remote screens with all that functionality?
A dumb terminal replaces the Matrox hardware for much cheaper.Lots of people don't want dumb terminals. They want nice fat systems for whatever reason. This gives them that option.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
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
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 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.
You got X running with 4bit colour in 1995 and you're complaining?
That's a bit harsh. It's not like it was the only card at the time that was a nightmare to get running.
Complaining about shitty X drivers for ATI cards in 2007 is fine. Complaining about shitty X drivers for Matrox cards in 1995 not quite the same. Especially when anyone running an alternative OS at that time should have done their research before spending $400.