Tom's Hardware already has a review up about it, and it looks to live up to most of the hype.
Right. And for readers that want a review by people that actually know what they are talking about, you can read the review at Ace's Hardware.
In other news, the P3 @ 3.06GHz is indeed a fast CPU, but considering that it's maximum power dissipation is 105W to the Athlon 2800+'s 68W, it looks like people should stop making fun of the Athlon for running so hot.:) This comparison isn't completely fair (the Pentium IV is faster), but even the P4 2.2GHz spews 70 W of heat. At 105W, the P4 is approaching the (in)famous heat output of the Intel Itanium! This is not a good thing. (note: regarding Tom's Hardware, I have no specific complaint about the article, just the website quality in general. The reviewers, except for Tom, have no clue and generally spew pure uninformed BS throughout their articles. Why the site is still respected is a complete mystery to me.)
The Athlon system you mention is packing 2 CPUs per 1U of space (half as dense per U)
From the article I quoted: At a depth of only 15", the A120 can be stacked back-to-back so up to 4 processors, with over thirteen Gigaflops (billion instructions per second) of computing power, can fit in a 1U space per server
Ergo,
4 processors per U.
Everyone knows the Athlon is memory starved. 3.5GB per system should be plenty for most tasks. For those requiring more RAM per CPU or a larger contiguous chunk of RAM, yes, MIPS (and other 64-bit processors) are a better choice. However, I was talking strictly about processing power density, in which the Athlon systems (which fit four processors per rack) wins. Regarding real-world tasks, there are bound to be a certain number of tasks that MIPS chips accel in. Just being 64-bit makes them faster at dealing with huge numbers (>~4.3 billion), but I doubt they outperform Athlons on most real-world tasks. Of course, MIPS can run Irix, which is a kick-ass Unix implementation (particularly for video and other streaming media), so they do have the advantage there.
Anyway, it doesn't compare to what SGI is selling. It does in processing density. I would not claim that a bunch of Athlons is a superior solution for, say, a streaming video server or a render farm. Regarding the render farm, though, it seems many movie companies would disagree, as many SGI render farms are being dumped in favor of Athlon and Xeon clusters. (mostly for price, of course)
The comparison is like saying a riced-up turbo Honda will beat a Ferrari I would say that my comparison was more like saying "given a parking lot of size X, the total horse power of all engines in the parking lot is greater when filled with tightly packed BMW M5's than with a single gigantic diesel engine whose driveshaft is driven by multiple smaller diesel engines, all of which share the same fuel tank." Of course, car/computer analogies all suck.:)
Today SGI announced the Origin 3900 server, the world's densest computer. How dense? How about 16 MIPS R14000A processors and 32 GB of RAM in a 4-rack-unit 'superbrick,'.
The server may be SGI's densest, but at least as far as processing power, it is not the densest. As a counterexample, the above configuration has four processors per unit. Many vendors sell 1U Athlon servers in which each unit holds two dual Athlon systems (four processors per unit), and I can assure you that an AthlonMP 2200+ is quite a bit faster than a MIPS R14000 @ 600MHz. True, those two Athlon systems aren't a single server, but we're talking density here. Regardless, SGI does have the Athlon beaten hands down on memory per unit.
Nope, it's not of the future. The HDD future belongs to something else: platter-level RAID systems.
I'm sorry to be blunt, but that is incorrect. If you are interested in the future of storage, follow StorageReview.com's forums. Every other week or so when someone comes into the forums complaining that nobody makes such a drive, or comes up with this "great new idea!!", they are usually referred to the website of Tannin, one of the more knowledgeable members, who keeps track of this sort of thing. Here is that website: Odd drives
I don't mean to be rude, but you made your statement about interdrive RAID authoritatively, as if you knew this for a fact, which you do not, because it is wrong. Further, you are incorrect about the reasons for not implementing such a system. The real reasons are:
1) Too expensive. It simply costs more to make. It requires a small processor to split and recombine data, it requires extra testing, it requires extra validation, more complex firmware, and is less reliable.
2) Time to market. See 1
3) There is absolutely no point. As the website linked states, you can achieve the same results with two ordinary hard drives in RAID. If you are going to spend extra on such a drive, you mas as well get better reliability/performance/capacity by just using the tried and true method of more than one drive.
To further compound the incorrectness of the statement, the primary advantage of RAM and Flash-ROM based drives--the reason they are so good, is their access time. The world's fastest hard drive, the Seagate Cheetah 15k.3, access data in milliseconds. Even poor quality RAM can access in microseconds or nanoseconds. One company used as a "case study" by Platypus, a company making solid state disk drives, was able to replace their mail server drives with platypus drives and REDUCE the number of servers (which had RAID) rather than increase the number. Mail servers do not give a damn about sustained transfer rate (STR), but they certainly do care about access times, especially when dealing with tons of small files like Maildir-bases systems use.
Again, I don't mean to be an asshole. I have certainly been dead wrong my fair share of times, but I am usually rather bluntly corrected. Make a mental note and drive on.
The Cringely article made Eolas sound like they were interested in re-establiching competition and hurting Microsoft's almost complete control of the browser market. If the company was simply greedy -- greedy enough to exclude Mozilla and other free browsers -- they would probably just demand a large payout, then all the executives would retire, sickeningly wealthy.
This probably doesn't matter, though, because Microsoft is so big they will almost certainly find a way to prevent this from happening. It is even possible that Eolas is going public with their intention in order to scare Microsoft into accepting an even larger settlement. Even if Microsoft cannot brute-force the patent, they will probably try something like redefining "plugin" or somesuch, perhaps creating an easy way to statically link "plugins" on the fly. They would point this out (or whatever technique they could use) to Eolas, and then Eolas will either lose in the long run or simply accept a payout after all, for fear of losing anyway.
Still, wouldn't it be incredibly cool if Eolas could actually pull it off? Mike Doyle would be remembered as the hero of the entire computer industry, having done what the Justice Dept. and dozens of competitors could not do -- Ironically, using patents: The same system that has so often been wielded as a weapon to fight freedom and technology for simple profit.
Not quite as nice. Many Koreans can get internet connections nearing or exceeding 100Mbit (!!!) for $15-$25/mo equivalent. The country has forum websites that are perfectly happy lettign you post multi-megabyte pictures because their gigabit and ten-gigabit (!!!) connections can hack it, and are dirt cheap.
Of course, when you consider the average pay of Korean citizens this suddenly doesn't seem quite so like an internet Mecca, but still...
WTF is this article about? The "Power of the Interweb" is turning dirt farmers into city slickers?
FYI I am from and grew up in Idaho and have known exactly one farmer (well, and his wife). My parents, which still live there, have had broadband for years. DirecTV has major DirectDSL operations in Idaho. Idaho is the location of the headquarters of Micron and of large portions of HP as well as many other tech companies.
I believe he was referring to "making a photocopy" as "Xeroxing", just didn't mention the photocopy part. "Xerox" is both a verb and a noun in the U.S.:)
Is there a way to tell which manufacturers aren't effected by this problem--that is, which ones do not purchase capacitors from Asia (or at least Taiwan)? The list may be small, but there to appear to be manufacturers that consistantly churn out good products with only the occasional hiccup. Tyan, Supermicro, MSI, and perhaps Asus are all reliable manufacturers in general. However, they may all be using the defective capacitors, and the problems may not be noticed until the boards have been around for a while. Remember the IBM 75GXP hard drive--it was hailed as "the" drive to have for enthusiasts at the time. It wasn't until six months and millions of drives later that it was found out they were crap.
Hopefully they won't try this kind of BS again. Nintendo has existed for over 100 years and, as far as large media companies go, has been very ethical.
Now we can remove the skads of useless, annoying crap that the player comes with (not trying to troll, but the official RealPlayer is an incredibly annoying application) and cut it down the core--the excellent video and audio technologies that they have developed. Wrap it up in a package 500K and have a nice, useful tool.
Don't forget to mention OpenSSH and OpenSSL! Or doesn't that fit in your list-of-things-for-which-djb-has-made-a-replacemen t-so-you-can-piss-on-it-each-time-they-get-mention ed?
Perhaps if you'd look at the recent security record of these, you'd find that they weren't DoD-grade material quite yet. And yes, Dan Bernstein probably could write a more secure implementation given is track record.
A DoD guy talking about his knowledgeable co-workers advocating OSS, being powered by coffee and Dew, and whose signature links to a web page whose largest graphic is a Southpark character...
Is this some other Department of Defense that I was not previously aware of?
whatever happened to good old ASCII or ISO text files? The PDF document contains images, tables, colors, and underlined/italicized/bold text. Those are rather difficult to express in plain ASCII text. Doing so is not unlike trying to write a voxel-based graphics engine in HTML.
If you actually tried to open up any but the most basic Word document in Wordpad, it butchers the document. Try it. However, that's beside the point. You see, not everyone runs Windows, and not everyone wants to open a document that can come with little extras like macro virii.
Further,.PDF documents are extremely common. Get used to it. If you really can't stand to have to download extra software to view such a common format, you'll be happy to know that most Linux distributions come with at least one.PDF viewer.
You may not want to work for the government in anything technical. Sure, you may get to play with some neat toys, but after seeing so many Sun Enterprise systems used as office mail servers -- sitting alongside NT database servers equipped with 64MB RAM, one tends to go insane.:)
Correction: Upon further inspection, Qmail is graciously listed, though the others seem to still be absent (unless I can't search properly).
"Qmail is a FOSS replacement for Sendmail, the program that transfers emails between computers on the Internet. Qmail has improved security, reliability, and performance features."
Yep, that pretty much sums it up. I'm impressed.:)
"Generally Recognised as Safe... bind, and sendmail."
I'm all for Unix server software, but BIND and Sendmail? True, they haven't been bad lately, but both of these are former poster childs for the land of remote root exploits. Yet Qmail, djbdns, and Postfix--some of the most secure software ever made, is strangely absent. Well, it is the government. They are making progress in their own little way.:)
Hopefully the website's server isn't this guy's shiny...er, new SX-64. It just melted.
The page:
this page is dedicated to my efforts to skillfully implant a 1+GHZ system inside of my Commodore SX-64 portable computer. this modification will be completely stealth. in fact, when my C64 emulator is running, it should be completely indistinguishable from the original system. however, when the emulator is not running, i will be able to watch DVDs, play MP3s, surf the internet, and play games from anywhere through windows XP. a truly portable system, complete with integrated monitor, keyboard, and handle! lan parties here i come!
SX-64 History
this was my commodore sx-64 before it was modified. i got it for free from a friend at work back some time in january. this little machine was the world's first COLOR portable computer system. the keyboard doubles as a protective face for the case. the handle doubles as a tilting arm to make the monitor more viewable.
the original unmodified SX-64
the system has a built-in 5-inch color CRT monitor, a commodore 1541 disk drive, a 1mhz cpu, 64k of RAM, MOS6581 sound chip, and a VIC20 video chip (320x200 pixels, 4-bit color, 40x25 text mode). it also comes with a built-in speaker, a game cartridge slot on the top, an expansion port on the back, an RS232-C serial port, two gameports, and composite NTSC/PAL out (depending on where your SX-64 came from). the operating system is SX-64 BASIC (developed by microsoft!!). the system was released in 1983 and retailed for around $1000 USD.
some of the world's best games (IMO) were for this system. classics like the original PAC-MAN, donkey kong, maniac mansion, etc were well worth the price of the system back in the day. not to mention, the BASIC operating system was so easy to use, you could program your own game in no time. no microsoft APIs, DLLs, or bluescreens to deal with! just PEEK and POKE your graphics and sounds to memory, and you were on your way to being a professional programmer (aside from learning assembly, of course:]).
from what i've read, the SX-64 was a flop because it was targeted towards the business market (it was called the "executive computer"). it competed with laptops like the Toshiba T-1000, but was heavier, had no batteries, and didn't fit in your lap. the sx-64 dissapeared as quickly as it arrived. today they remain a collector's item.
20 years later
given, the sx-64 kicked ass in the 1980's, but my current computer is literally 1600 times faster than this thing! i wouldn't use a 5-year old computer without complaining, let alone a 20 year old computer. computers need to be able to stream DVDs, movies, surf the internet, play 3d games, and store gigabytes worth of mp3's before they can be considered useful nowadays.
the only way to wedge a new motherboard in my C64 will be to go SMALL.
the latest computer craze (at least the latest craze i've been following) is the 'small form factor' (SFF) PC. these little systems work great for home theater PCs (HTPCs), internet terminals, and lan parties. i, for one, would hate to lug a full-size tower and monitor to a lan party and back. but my SX-64 above would be perfect for lan parties. it has a handle, it's rugged, and everything's built-in (even the monitor!).
SFF motherboards (the two big form factors now are Flex ATX and Mini ITX) are the perfect choice for my project because they have integrated sound, network, video, and tv out. the tv out is probably the most important since the c64's internal CRT takes an NTSC s-video input. without it, the screen would be useless. the only bad part is that the 3d graphics will suck pretty hard (s3 savage core) so lan parties will suck for me because i will probably get killed a lot since i'll probably be playing at a low resolution. (update: I'm running about 40fps in cstrike in 800x600. It's not as good as a Geforce4, but at least it's faster than the original c64's VIC chip!
Research
planning plays a big part in any big project. if i was just adding a window kit or something stupid like that, yea i could just go to town with a dremel and not expect any real problems. but if i cut too much away from the case, or just guessed on which wires to solder, this whole project would be over.
after searching around the internet, i found the original schematics for the seperate boards inside the sx-64. several circuit boards will have to be designed and etched to interface the sx-64 case to the newer hardware. (update: most of these boards can be found in the tech info section). many hours of dremeling the steel inside the case were required, because the original cards were mounted vertically, and my motherboard has to go in horizontally.
Slashdot Mirror
Tom's Hardware already has a review up about it, and it looks to live up to most of the hype.
:)
Right. And for readers that want a review by people that actually know what they are talking about, you can read the review at Ace's Hardware.
In other news, the P3 @ 3.06GHz is indeed a fast CPU, but considering that it's maximum power dissipation is 105W to the Athlon 2800+'s 68W, it looks like people should stop making fun of the Athlon for running so hot.
This comparison isn't completely fair (the Pentium IV is faster), but even the P4 2.2GHz spews 70 W of heat.
At 105W, the P4 is approaching the (in)famous heat output of the Intel Itanium! This is not a good thing.
(note: regarding Tom's Hardware, I have no specific complaint about the article, just the website quality in general. The reviewers, except for Tom, have no clue and generally spew pure uninformed BS throughout their articles. Why the site is still respected is a complete mystery to me.)
Isaac Newton's revolutionary "Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica" from a Russian museum.
:)
Odd. I could have sworn it was located in the Huntington museum in California, along with Newton's notes, seeing as how I saw it not six months ago.
Of course, it may have been moved to Russia since then. See if we'll ever loan them a famous scientific work again!
The Athlon system you mention is packing 2 CPUs per 1U of space (half as dense per U)
:)
From the article I quoted:
At a depth of only 15", the A120 can be stacked back-to-back so up to 4 processors, with over thirteen Gigaflops (billion instructions per second) of computing power, can fit in a 1U space per server
Ergo,
4 processors per U.
Everyone knows the Athlon is memory starved.
3.5GB per system should be plenty for most tasks. For those requiring more RAM per CPU or a larger contiguous chunk of RAM, yes, MIPS (and other 64-bit processors) are a better choice. However, I was talking strictly about processing power density, in which the Athlon systems (which fit four processors per rack) wins.
Regarding real-world tasks, there are bound to be a certain number of tasks that MIPS chips accel in. Just being 64-bit makes them faster at dealing with huge numbers (>~4.3 billion), but I doubt they outperform Athlons on most real-world tasks. Of course, MIPS can run Irix, which is a kick-ass Unix implementation (particularly for video and other streaming media), so they do have the advantage there.
Anyway, it doesn't compare to what SGI is selling. It does in processing density. I would not claim that a bunch of Athlons is a superior solution for, say, a streaming video server or a render farm. Regarding the render farm, though, it seems many movie companies would disagree, as many SGI render farms are being dumped in favor of Athlon and Xeon clusters. (mostly for price, of course)
The comparison is like saying a riced-up turbo Honda will beat a Ferrari
I would say that my comparison was more like saying "given a parking lot of size X, the total horse power of all engines in the parking lot is greater when filled with tightly packed BMW M5's than with a single gigantic diesel engine whose driveshaft is driven by multiple smaller diesel engines, all of which share the same fuel tank."
Of course, car/computer analogies all suck.
Today SGI announced the Origin 3900 server, the world's densest computer. How dense? How about 16 MIPS R14000A processors and 32 GB of RAM in a 4-rack-unit 'superbrick,'.
The server may be SGI's densest, but at least as far as processing power, it is not the densest. As a counterexample, the above configuration has four processors per unit. Many vendors sell 1U Athlon servers in which each unit holds two dual Athlon systems (four processors per unit), and I can assure you that an AthlonMP 2200+ is quite a bit faster than a MIPS R14000 @ 600MHz.
True, those two Athlon systems aren't a single server, but we're talking density here.
Regardless, SGI does have the Athlon beaten hands down on memory per unit.
There's an "AirPlaneHomes.com"?
Nope, it's not of the future. The HDD future belongs to something else: platter-level RAID systems.
I'm sorry to be blunt, but that is incorrect. If you are interested in the future of storage, follow StorageReview.com's forums. Every other week or so when someone comes into the forums complaining that nobody makes such a drive, or comes up with this "great new idea!!", they are usually referred to the website of Tannin, one of the more knowledgeable members, who keeps track of this sort of thing. Here is that website: Odd drives
I don't mean to be rude, but you made your statement about interdrive RAID authoritatively, as if you knew this for a fact, which you do not, because it is wrong. Further, you are incorrect about the reasons for not implementing such a system. The real reasons are:
1) Too expensive. It simply costs more to make. It requires a small processor to split and recombine data, it requires extra testing, it requires extra validation, more complex firmware, and is less reliable.
2) Time to market. See 1
3) There is absolutely no point. As the website linked states, you can achieve the same results with two ordinary hard drives in RAID. If you are going to spend extra on such a drive, you mas as well get better reliability/performance/capacity by just using the tried and true method of more than one drive.
To further compound the incorrectness of the statement, the primary advantage of RAM and Flash-ROM based drives--the reason they are so good, is their access time. The world's fastest hard drive, the Seagate Cheetah 15k.3, access data in milliseconds. Even poor quality RAM can access in microseconds or nanoseconds.
One company used as a "case study" by Platypus, a company making solid state disk drives, was able to replace their mail server drives with platypus drives and REDUCE the number of servers (which had RAID) rather than increase the number. Mail servers do not give a damn about sustained transfer rate (STR), but they certainly do care about access times, especially when dealing with tons of small files like Maildir-bases systems use.
Again, I don't mean to be an asshole. I have certainly been dead wrong my fair share of times, but I am usually rather bluntly corrected. Make a mental note and drive on.
The Cringely article made Eolas sound like they were interested in re-establiching competition and hurting Microsoft's almost complete control of the browser market.
If the company was simply greedy -- greedy enough to exclude Mozilla and other free browsers -- they would probably just demand a large payout, then all the executives would retire, sickeningly wealthy.
This probably doesn't matter, though, because Microsoft is so big they will almost certainly find a way to prevent this from happening. It is even possible that Eolas is going public with their intention in order to scare Microsoft into accepting an even larger settlement. Even if Microsoft cannot brute-force the patent, they will probably try something like redefining "plugin" or somesuch, perhaps creating an easy way to statically link "plugins" on the fly. They would point this out (or whatever technique they could use) to Eolas, and then Eolas will either lose in the long run or simply accept a payout after all, for fear of losing anyway.
Still, wouldn't it be incredibly cool if Eolas could actually pull it off? Mike Doyle would be remembered as the hero of the entire computer industry, having done what the Justice Dept. and dozens of competitors could not do -- Ironically, using patents: The same system that has so often been wielded as a weapon to fight freedom and technology for simple profit.
Sounds like Korea, a bit
Not quite as nice. Many Koreans can get internet connections nearing or exceeding 100Mbit (!!!) for $15-$25/mo equivalent. The country has forum websites that are perfectly happy lettign you post multi-megabyte pictures because their gigabit and ten-gigabit (!!!) connections can hack it, and are dirt cheap.
Of course, when you consider the average pay of Korean citizens this suddenly doesn't seem quite so like an internet Mecca, but still...
WTF is this article about? The "Power of the Interweb" is turning dirt farmers into city slickers?
FYI I am from and grew up in Idaho and have known exactly one farmer (well, and his wife). My parents, which still live there, have had broadband for years.
DirecTV has major DirectDSL operations in Idaho. Idaho is the location of the headquarters of Micron and of large portions of HP as well as many other tech companies.
What was that about dirt farmers?
I believe he was referring to "making a photocopy" as "Xeroxing", just didn't mention the photocopy part. "Xerox" is both a verb and a noun in the U.S. :)
Is there a way to tell which manufacturers aren't effected by this problem--that is, which ones do not purchase capacitors from Asia (or at least Taiwan)?
The list may be small, but there to appear to be manufacturers that consistantly churn out good products with only the occasional hiccup. Tyan, Supermicro, MSI, and perhaps Asus are all reliable manufacturers in general.
However, they may all be using the defective capacitors, and the problems may not be noticed until the boards have been around for a while. Remember the IBM 75GXP hard drive--it was hailed as "the" drive to have for enthusiasts at the time. It wasn't until six months and millions of drives later that it was found out they were crap.
Now there's a game that lives up to its name.
"...so what do you see when the driver crashes?"
Hmm. Which operating system do YOU use?
Isn't the US2i artificially limited to 2GB of RAM?
:)
The website seems to say that the laptop simultaneously has 4GB and 2GB. *THAT* is the power of Sun hardware.
Hopefully they won't try this kind of BS again. Nintendo has existed for over 100 years and, as far as large media companies go, has been very ethical.
Now we can remove the skads of useless, annoying crap that the player comes with (not trying to troll, but the official RealPlayer is an incredibly annoying application) and cut it down the core--the excellent video and audio technologies that they have developed.
Wrap it up in a package 500K and have a nice, useful tool.
Don't forget to mention OpenSSH and OpenSSL!n t-so-you-can-piss-on-it-each-time-they-get-mention ed?
Or doesn't that fit in your list-of-things-for-which-djb-has-made-a-replaceme
Perhaps if you'd look at the recent security record of these, you'd find that they weren't DoD-grade material quite yet.
And yes, Dan Bernstein probably could write a more secure implementation given is track record.
I work for the DoD, too, so I think I have a fairly reliable perspective.
A DoD guy talking about his knowledgeable co-workers advocating OSS, being powered by coffee and Dew, and whose signature links to a web page whose largest graphic is a Southpark character...
Is this some other Department of Defense that I was not previously aware of?
whatever happened to good old ASCII or ISO text files?
The PDF document contains images, tables, colors, and underlined/italicized/bold text. Those are rather difficult to express in plain ASCII text.
Doing so is not unlike trying to write a voxel-based graphics engine in HTML.
Right tool for the job...
If you actually tried to open up any but the most basic Word document in Wordpad, it butchers the document. Try it.
.PDF documents are extremely common. Get used to it. If you really can't stand to have to download extra software to view such a common format, you'll be happy to know that most Linux distributions come with at least one .PDF viewer.
However, that's beside the point. You see, not everyone runs Windows, and not everyone wants to open a document that can come with little extras like macro virii.
Further,
Not that the parent wasn't a troll or anything...
You may not want to work for the government in anything technical. Sure, you may get to play with some neat toys, but after seeing so many Sun Enterprise systems used as office mail servers -- sitting alongside NT database servers equipped with 64MB RAM, one tends to go insane. :)
Correction: Upon further inspection, Qmail is graciously listed, though the others seem to still be absent (unless I can't search properly).
:)
"Qmail is a FOSS replacement for Sendmail, the
program that transfers emails between computers
on the Internet. Qmail has improved security,
reliability, and performance features."
Yep, that pretty much sums it up. I'm impressed.
"Generally Recognised as Safe ... bind, and sendmail."
:)
I'm all for Unix server software, but BIND and Sendmail? True, they haven't been bad lately, but both of these are former poster childs for the land of remote root exploits. Yet Qmail, djbdns, and Postfix--some of the most secure software ever made, is strangely absent.
Well, it is the government. They are making progress in their own little way.
Hopefully the website's server isn't this guy's shiny ...er, new SX-64. It just melted.
:]).
The page:
this page is dedicated to my efforts to skillfully implant a 1+GHZ system inside of my Commodore SX-64 portable computer. this modification will be completely stealth. in fact, when my C64 emulator is running, it should be completely indistinguishable from the original system. however, when the emulator is not running, i will be able to watch DVDs, play MP3s, surf the internet, and play games from anywhere through windows XP. a truly portable system, complete with integrated monitor, keyboard, and handle! lan parties here i come!
SX-64 History
this was my commodore sx-64 before it was modified. i got it for free from a friend at work back some time in january. this little machine was the world's first COLOR portable computer system. the keyboard doubles as a protective face for the case. the handle doubles as a tilting arm to make the monitor more viewable.
the original unmodified SX-64
the system has a built-in 5-inch color CRT monitor, a commodore 1541 disk drive, a 1mhz cpu, 64k of RAM, MOS6581 sound chip, and a VIC20 video chip (320x200 pixels, 4-bit color, 40x25 text mode). it also comes with a built-in speaker, a game cartridge slot on the top, an expansion port on the back, an RS232-C serial port, two gameports, and composite NTSC/PAL out (depending on where your SX-64 came from). the operating system is SX-64 BASIC (developed by microsoft!!). the system was released in 1983 and retailed for around $1000 USD.
some of the world's best games (IMO) were for this system. classics like the original PAC-MAN, donkey kong, maniac mansion, etc were well worth the price of the system back in the day. not to mention, the BASIC operating system was so easy to use, you could program your own game in no time. no microsoft APIs, DLLs, or bluescreens to deal with! just PEEK and POKE your graphics and sounds to memory, and you were on your way to being a professional programmer (aside from learning assembly, of course
from what i've read, the SX-64 was a flop because it was targeted towards the business market (it was called the "executive computer"). it competed with laptops like the Toshiba T-1000, but was heavier, had no batteries, and didn't fit in your lap. the sx-64 dissapeared as quickly as it arrived. today they remain a collector's item.
20 years later
given, the sx-64 kicked ass in the 1980's, but my current computer is literally 1600 times faster than this thing! i wouldn't use a 5-year old computer without complaining, let alone a 20 year old computer. computers need to be able to stream DVDs, movies, surf the internet, play 3d games, and store gigabytes worth of mp3's before they can be considered useful nowadays.
the only way to wedge a new motherboard in my C64 will be to go SMALL.
the latest computer craze (at least the latest craze i've been following) is the 'small form factor' (SFF) PC. these little systems work great for home theater PCs (HTPCs), internet terminals, and lan parties. i, for one, would hate to lug a full-size tower and monitor to a lan party and back. but my SX-64 above would be perfect for lan parties. it has a handle, it's rugged, and everything's built-in (even the monitor!).
SFF motherboards (the two big form factors now are Flex ATX and Mini ITX) are the perfect choice for my project because they have integrated sound, network, video, and tv out. the tv out is probably the most important since the c64's internal CRT takes an NTSC s-video input. without it, the screen would be useless. the only bad part is that the 3d graphics will suck pretty hard (s3 savage core) so lan parties will suck for me because i will probably get killed a lot since i'll probably be playing at a low resolution. (update: I'm running about 40fps in cstrike in 800x600. It's not as good as a Geforce4, but at least it's faster than the original c64's VIC chip!
Research
planning plays a big part in any big project. if i was just adding a window kit or something stupid like that, yea i could just go to town with a dremel and not expect any real problems. but if i cut too much away from the case, or just guessed on which wires to solder, this whole project would be over.
after searching around the internet, i found the original schematics for the seperate boards inside the sx-64. several circuit boards will have to be designed and etched to interface the sx-64 case to the newer hardware. (update: most of these boards can be found in the tech info section). many hours of dremeling the steel inside the case were required, because the original cards were mounted vertically, and my motherboard has to go in horizontally.