CoreDuo board with 6 PCI slots

[astroman]

http://www.ieiworld.com/en/product_IPC. ... =IMBA-9454

just stumbled over this when checking specs for an industrial SBC board
they also offer Tualatin and BX chipset (up to 1GB Ram for the latter) single board systems, which look promising for rack mountable Scopes

cheers, Tom

[garyb]

good find.
the us distributor is very close to here. i called them and spoke about getting a board for evaluation. they won't have more of those until march, but they have others that have similar specs. i also requested a catalog. these guys make a lot of interesting looking thins...

[soul-synthesis]

Looks interesting, though expensive. I contacted the australian distributer down here, got quoted $421 (ex gst) which is like 315 USD. That's like daylight rape!

Most core2duo boards have 3 PCI slots anyway. Enough for 3 scope cards

[astroman]

well, I haven't tried them yet...
but given the fact this really is as what it's sold - industrial quality - I wouldn't even think about the fact that it's twice as 'expensive' as an ASUS consumer gimme-di-geeko-deluxo
the difference is just $5 per month if you'd throw it away after 2 years, if it saves me from headaches, no problem...

cheers, Tom

[garyb]

yeah, i'd like to see a newer chipset, but it is core duo ready, so it should be good for quite some time. conroes are really quite a bit better than p4s, but my p4 and 865 chipset are still very viable and useful. a fast conroe will give you a very good machine from now until, with the current software. there comes a point where you can't blame the tools because they are more than capable if you are......

this would be a great premium motherboard for scope computers if it's well designed and manufactured. i'm interested to see a sample(i'm gonna ask about one). you know, a group buy could make something like this very reasonably priced. sales of a specialty motherboard like this are low, so the price is high to keep the companies involved in business. a nice order would make it worth the seller's time to makes less on each item.......

[garyb]

yes, that's crossed my mind too....

[Lima]

Thanks this is a very interesting discussion. I was a bit scared by the possibility to see less PCI slot in the future boards, but this gives a breath of fresh air.

[petehalo]

I was planning on putting together second pc to host 3 typeII cards but now that this mobo with 6 pci slot has surfaced I'd like to know if it would be possible to put all six of my 6dsp TypeII boards in a single PC. I'm aware that I'd need to make special STM cables to hook all the cards together but are there any other restrictions besides that?

[astroman]

imho the minimum condition to get it working is that the 6 slots are on 1 single PCI bus. Which is (afaik) not standard today as it demands a more expensive hardware design. More likely the slots are adressed as 2 busses with 3 slots each - you may check that with the chipset doc.

To distribute the highly modularized DSP code isn't a simple task at all.
According to Scope4Live's experiences SFP starts to get non optimal results already with 3 15-chip boards on complex projects.

Unless your projects are of the 'simple structured - heavy voice' type I wouldn't expect any reasonable results. This software has no way of 'knowledge processing' included, and choice points what to load where may increase exponentially with the number of chips.
I don't know it for sure, but I wouldn't be surprised either...
everyone will be keen on your results though, should you try it

cheers, Tom
ps - I mentioned the link in the first place for those with 3 Scope cards and some UAD or Powercore stuff, too