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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.
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?
As opposed to say putting the artists in a soundproof room, and the recording and PC gear in a control room.
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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
But, the real question is if these cables ran under water could we consider each packet a photon torpedo?
I read the script, and I think it would help my character's motivation if he was on fire. -Bender
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