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World's smallest PII motherboard?
Zoyd writes "Just out with the world's smallest PII motherboard is Cell Computing. Dimensions: 3 x 5 x 0.7". Weight: 170g. "
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Happened to me too. What's the fix for it? men_khaure.at.hotmail.dot.com
These people had a booth at LinuxWorld in San Jose, and they actually had one of these things running with a little tiny LCD monitor attached to it. It looked pretty neat. I picked up a brochure type thing which is the actual size of the motherboard, with photos printed on it (so it looks like a paper version of the actual thing) it's pretty interesting how much they got on the thing. It appears to be multi leveled so there are boards piled on one another. Impressive anyway.
I have seen it and run it. After his boring 20 minute explination about how cool this thing was he said it cost 1995.00. It was a 233Mz with 32M RAM running RedHat 6.0 and GNOME. It is the size of 2 pop tarts.
As long as you didn't use a Toyota Tercel or an 84 Honda Accord... I'm so tired of seeing spiffy mobile car hacks done to vehicles that aren't worth the hardware that's getting installed in 'em. Makes me giggle.
(I know most geeks hate cars & all that, but forgive me, as long as we're talking mobile equipment..make it worthwhile)
People don't need servers sitting back in the office. A server for everyone! Contains all your email, dev work whatever. Connect it w. 100-Base-T to any network (or your laptop) and you are in business
Ok...so where do I plug the cdrom in? And where do you put the keyboard and mouse for that matter? Do you superglue the unit to the back of the keyboard for portability? Looks like something that was done "because it can be done", not for any practical use that I can think of.
Are you tweaking it with hdparm? Specifically, are you using -X34 or -X66? I have a WD UDMA/33 drive and if I give it -X34 I get errors like this, with -X66 it works fine. If you aren't using RAID, and not many people with IDE drives are, there's absolutely no point in enabling UDMA/33 or 66 anyway. The best IDE drives can only transfer at around 16MB/sec anyway.
My sparc20 at work may be approximately the speed of a Pentium 100 with 32Megs of RAM and a 1gig hard drive, but the Pizzabox form factor ups the coolness quotient by an order of magnitude!
Anybody make pizzabox intel hardware. Closest I could find is Intel's NLX motherboard, which puts the PCI slots on a riser card. Pretty slim for a PC, but STILL not a real Pizzabox workstation.
HPCF
Oh, we're a WINTEL company. Sorry, I quit.
Hmmm..
Are those RAM modules the same as in SGI's "Visual Workstation" or they simply look alike?
I guessed those were proprietary design.
fite the power
Quit being a whiney baby... is that your Pampers that's emitting that foul smell?
Already!? that's got to be some kinda record
Extremism in the cause of liberty is no vice, Moderation in the cause of freedom is no virtue. --B.Goldwater
how bout a filterable 'small' topic so us people without the tiny-device fetish can stop groaning every 4 visits to slashdot?
This would have been good for my car since when I build something it has to be nice/reliable. I recently installed a P166MMX CPU/motherboard and a dual CPU (40MHz SuperSPARC) SPARCstation 10 motherboard into my car. The sparcstation runs Solaris 2.5.1 and runs some very expensive voice recoginition software. Linked to the pentium w/a RJ-45 crossover cable. All in all it's basically how "Kitt" would be in the real world, except I didn't use a Trans-Am and the voice recognition is only used to me, and even that's certainly not perfect ;). This would have been a great piece of hardware though... unless it totally burns a hole in the wallet.
Just power your small WindowsNT(tm)(r) Server microserver with the blood of penguins.
I know what you're trying to say, but just because we get beoweenies spamming every time doesnt mean its shit.
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
I think I hear your mother calling .......
"Pray arm me further by your reply" Winston Churchill
very cute.
J.
have a look at www.empeg.com - car MP3 player which runs linux.
Uses a StrongARM SA-110 CPU, which draws something like ~500mW peak and something in the region of 5-10mW idle.
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
Any ideas on what will power the wearables of the next century?
StrongARM are nice.
Designed by ARM Ltd. (UK company). Licensed by a lot of companies, eg intel. RISC-like, 32-bit. Currently available at up to 233MHz or so. Intel says they'll produce 600MHz+ versions in the near future.
Extremely low power consumption. Less than a Watt peak for the 233MHz version (~450mW @ 160MHz), just a few mW idle.
Supported by linux (eg the Netwinder). Company in England has an SA-110 ATX motherboard iirc. Also used in things like RAID controllers (Mylex's new one i think) and Empeg (car mp3 player -> www.empeg.com).
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
If memory serves they were showing this toy at LWE on the expo floor; it was playing the role of a server... I was suitably impressed. If it weren't for the fact I don't need that much horsepower in a box and I need PC/104 support, I'd be using it. As it is, I've ordered the predecessor, the CardPC and a MightyMite carrier.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Hit http://www.cellcomuting.com and follow the stuff from there.
They've got some really cool stuff (they also have the CardPC which was being seriously considered for wearable use...).
As for power supplies, try the size of a notebook supply (which is all this really is, is a notebook motherboard in a tighter form factor...) Doesn't bulk it up too much and if you factor that these things are intended to be wedged into process control systems that don't have a lot of space but can source the power to the unit, these things are a godsend.
The Parvus corporation is a reseller of these things and they've integrated the CardPC (the predecessor to this new toy) into their PC/104 line. Why do I mention this? Because they're going to be selling a substantial portion of their product line at Fry's to allow anyone interested to do embedded systems easily.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
It's http://www.cellcomputing.com. The link works fine, I just typoed the text for the link.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
off on this kind of stuff: anyone seen an
embedded Pentium or above with a 3D accel
chip on there? I have a valid embedded use
--
Insanity Takes Its Toll. Please Have Exact Change
Care about electronic freedom? Consider donating to the EFF!
I would bet that the damn thing probably runs fairly hot ... and yes, It would be pretty slick to put a cluster in a briefcase. :-)
/dev
"There's no secret. You just press the accelerator to the floor and keep turning left." -- Bill Vukovich
This happens to be on a rare occasion, and I have a Super 7 (K6-300) board.
--GAck
3. Profit!
2. ???
1. On Soviet Slashdot, a Beowulf cluster of alien Natalie Portman overlords welcomes YOU!
Cell Had a booth at the LW expo in San Jose. They have the P2, which looks like an HDA minus the platters, a pentium, and 486 boxen. The P166 is supposed to be something like $999. I was asking because of a mobile MP3 player. They were selling Happing Hacking keyboards as well.
I would like to use something small like this in the car. Use a wireless lan to dl MP3's via a cron job to the car overnight. Never have to futz with carrying disks to the vehicle. Power drain is an issue for the car though. Perhaps APM can idle it nicely, I don't want a dead battery after leaving the car at the airport for a week or two.
Forbidden donut....
Yee cats, but it's tiny. Such tech must be put to good use. So....um...send me a few, and I'll see what I can do (8
I'm sorry. What I meant to say was 'please excuse me.'
what came out of my mouth was 'Move or I'll kill you!'
That's even smaller than the chip itself! (if you count the casing) What exactly can one do with one of these things? I think the PII draws wayyy too much power to be used in any portable or whatever type applications, right? Oh well, it is still nifty!
Maybe some sort of 'off' switch is required ...
Really, it'd be possible to telnet or ssh to it and shut it down. Just prod a button to boot-up when you get back in the car so many weeks later.
Lovely idea though using it in the car.. mmm...
Delphis
fit a P2 on top of a hard drive (you'd have more space if you used a mobile Pentium) and it could run any unix just fine but why would you want to? Intel chips while nice to work on do suck power like a bitch (a 2 hour laptop battery is just crappy no matter what an salesman says). If I were going to build a tiny system I would want a PPC or a non-Intel x86 like a MediaGX or something that uses alot less power. What I want as a wearable is something like my watch, it ran for seven years on a single battery even with a whole bunch of stuff stored in memory, not like my cell phone which needs to be recharged all the time if I'm out all day with it on. I wouldn't want a handheld that needed to be charged every 8 hours either. When LEPs (Light Emitting Polymers) get more refined they will make screens cheaper and consume less power than LCDs. As for the chip, something that would only use as much power as it needed for whatever process it was running, doesn't the StrongARM do that? Anyways, when I get a few MONTHS out of a battery in my handheld I'll buy one but not until then.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
So it seems like the next step to make wearables truly useful is some kind of new power mechanism, so we don't have to swap out batteries every night. My digital camera gets a lot more life out of NiMH than alkaline batteries, so they're a good first step... but having to recharge after a couple of 8mb cards' worth of pictures is still a hassle.
Any ideas on what will power the wearables of the next century?
It's a hardware prob, but not the chipset, exactly. First, are you overclocking the memory bus (i.e. not 66MHz or 100MHz)? You could cheezle the PIIX or confuse the drive, since the PCI clock is 1/2 or 1/3 the memory bus clock (the DMA transfer mode is governed by the PCI clock). Running at 83MHz bus, regardless of the CPU's multiplied clock speed, makes you run the controller at 25% over rated speed!!! I've had no luck with multiple boards at 83, one an SIS 5571 and the other an Intel BX, though it's been known to be stable at 75. Second, what kind of cable do you have? Is it UDMA-rated? The cables designed to do so have a finer pitch ribbon cable so that every other wire is a ground lead. This decreases signal loss over distance. Look at *this* for more info on these cables. Also, is the cable hooked into any other IDE devices, esp. ones that don't do UDMA? Putting UDMA devices on a separate bus can sometimes alleviate these troubles.
Me? I believe in SCSI. It "Just Works", with far less CPU overhead and sickeningly fast throughput. It's worth every last penny.
The 333MHz Pentium II Plug-N-Run module is available immediately with volume pricing set at $399.00.
Install Tweak UI from http://www.microsoft.com/NTWorkstation/downloads/P owerToys/Networking/NTTweakUI.asp, select light arrow, then normal arrow, and OK. Should change them back. Try also deleting the shelliconcache file and rebooting. The best method is to reapply the current service pack.
"SP5 - The way NT was supposed to be."
The party's over
If you're using parallel programs, Beowulf is nice. But for ordinary use, MOSIX is better because it will distribute processes across systems automatically. So you just set up your piped scripts or parallel make the usual way.
It's a real dig to get to the datasheet on these on their website, 'cuz I was curious about that myself. It's no wonder that it's buried deep though. At 14 watts (about 1.1 amp draw) for the pII 333 model you aint gonna be using AA pen cells for them. That's without your hardrive too. So you better start doing some excersises down at the gym 'cuz your gonna need that hardbody.
BTW, with all the heat you'll be generating the duck tape will turn into a sticky mess.
All of a sudden everything is fast, but these are old articles.
moderators are 'signed in' people - a random swathe of those who log in are given moderatorship for three days ( you cant moderate and comment on the same topic ).
if you never sign in you will never be able to moderate.
ray
Heh it's one of those "I would love to have a beowulf cluster with these things"-guys again :) Where are my moderator-points when I need 'em ?
0x or or snor perron?!
Actually, all things should have their prices shown. I'm sometimes shopping for PLCs, compact PCs (sometimes that Linux box has to fit in a shoebox on the end of a crane boom), or ordinary PCs. I always have to consider the price range.
Man, that's painful. Basically, they all want you to call them so that they can lay their salesmen on you. They know that you probably aren't going to call *every* maker of similar products and that you will probably choose one of those you call.
Then again, when you call they sometimes send samples. Unfortunately SBC makers don't do that. Microchip does, however. Hmmm, I should hit them up for some of those new flash PICs. They look quite interesting.
Finally, a computer that takes little desk space, and is just big enough to hold my coffee, and with intel inside, it should keep my coffee hot, and the office warm!
But what about applications? I am considering picking one of these boards up. Anyone have any ideas on hobby projects? I think it will use too much power to build a small robot. Would a handheld P2 system be possible? Any other creative ideas (other than MP3 players)?
Other concerns:
Where can I get tiny TFT screens?
Are there any low power/small size hard drives? What about shock resistance?
Anyone know where I can get a tiny keyboard?
Any suggestions would help! I will build a webpage to document the project's progress to keep everyone informed.
Hey.. to anyone who knows who the hell this company is and can find real information on this thing, give me a url.. Does that thing include some sort of power supply on it? I seriously doubt it but I can hope right? Once you add a power supply to that thing it is bulky as hell.. if you ignore the power supply you could duct tape (or super gloo) a 13 gig harddrive to it and (if it had tv out) plug it into a tv for the screen.. need some tiny keyboard to go on top, but it would make a kewl tiny server (yer, that's useful) or you could just use it to kickarse presentations. When power is no longer a problem I'll find a use for these things, but I refuse to lug around the never-decreasing-in-size power supply.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Do they have a price for this thing listed somewhere? I haven't been able to find one.
I would love to have a beowulf cluster with these things...
:(
...if only I had the money!!!
Of course, it might be for the world's better good that I don't.
> Anyone besides me always get those wierd NT problems where all your desktop icons get replaced by other applications?
:)
Yes indeed. That happened to me just the other day. My shut down icon was replaced with the help icon, the help icon with a globe, etc. Very strange.
Oh, and to keep this moderately on topic: I wonder if the same thing would happen on one of those mini-pentiums?
Check your power supply. I have found that when a power supply is dying, hard drives are the first to notice, and that is a typical error for that sort of thing.
www.uclinux.org more functional and $100 less too!
who needs it, all I want is a modern incarnation of The Handy Board. I have a really cool Lego project in mind...
--
Industrial space for lease in Flatlandia.
I get that error on all my Maxtor udma33 ide hard drives on pentium1 boards.
Yeah, it is pretty small, but who wants the smallest motherboard. Mabey for a laptop, but for a desktop computer, I think the motherboards that we have are a good size, and they actually have and fit good compontents. For Laptops I say go ahead, get the smallest motherboard known to man, but for all of us human NON Bill Gate's, who don't have all the money in the world, get a real motherboard. You'll be much happier.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Holy CRAP that thing's tiny. That doesn't really have much information on it, though, and it seems to be for mobile P2s, which makes sense, of course, but those aren't exactly as accessable or cheap as Slot1 or Socket370 chips. Though it IS small enough for a decent wearable... Wonder if they'd consider making a version with a good 3D chip in it such as the Rage128, which is really designed for OEM integration, though finding a place to put all the video memory could be a problem... (not to mention that although Rage128s don't put out much heat power, they get really hot)
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Quine "quine?
Anyone besides me always get those wierd NT problems where all your desktop icons get replaced by other applications? Explorer's using Netscape Composer's icon right now, and Quake icon's for Word. Wacky...
Of course, I gotta be first to ask, "wouldn't it be nifty to have a beowolf cluster in a briefcase??" ;-)
...waiting for xfree4, waiting for KDE 2, Koffice, slackware 5, corelinux, Berlin, friday, october...money for guitar...money for new puter...waiting waiting waiting...
seriously though, i think these are cool. probably hella expensive and all though.
*offtopic* Dagnabit, I'm tired of waiting
"I want peace on earth and good will toward men." "We're the U.S. government. We don't do that sort of thing!!"
You can find an outline of spec here. As for price, EMJ doesn't have the P2-333 listed, but the P-233 version is US$1061 in single quantities. I wouldn't expect the P2-333 to be much more than $1200-1500. Observed maximum power consumption is 14.1W; averages they give for Windows* are 4.2-3W.
You'll probably want (need, actually) to get one of these if you want to actually use the module; the CardPAC provides all the physical I/O. 3.75"x5.3"x1.1" dimensions. Costs $999 direct from Cell Computing.
Doesn't have SB-compatible audio; does have USB though.
Plug a 256MB DIMM in, boot off a CompactFlash card and you've got one screamin' machine!
--The more you know, the less you know.
Damn, what a sweet Beowulf cluster these would make, just imagine how many you could cram in a room.
I feel dirty now.
Not anymore, really. You have to set 'willing to moderate' on your prefs, then you will get 5 points with which to moderate. When you've spent those points, you no longer can moderate until you get another 5 points. Availability of points seems to be driven by number of overall posts to /. and Rob seems to have tweaked this over time to make fewer points available.
/. posts, you need to get a new hobby :)
I used to get moderator access every few weeks, but I've since changed my prefs to not willing to moderate. On the whole, I've found that the moderating doesn't do anything for me since I browse at -1 anyway and all I see happening is that ppl complain about it more than anything else.
If it works for you and you set your limit to +2, great. If you think it sucks, set your limit to -1 and change your prefs to not show scores at all. If you valuate your worth as a human being based on the scores given to you
OK, so what's the big deal? Intel has been making
the MMO modules for a couple of years now, and these things look like they've just bought them and attached a fan to it...
Aren't these modules already inside most PII mobiles sold today?
Hrmmm....
And since it's going to be said eventually anyway, these could be used for having a complete Beowulf cluster in a single case... :)
Man. This could even be used for a handheld running BeOS or that obscure UNIX clone everyone keeps talking about or something...
Damn. if only I had the time, energy, and drive to do projects with these things...
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Quine "quine?
How much power does a human body generate? Maybe it could power some computers...
Now where have I heard that idea before?
Seriously, there are possible sources for human-powered wearable computing.