More Information on Total mPOWER? 9
Bingo Foo asks: "Many moons ago, I saw an article on some pretty neato sounding PowerPC daughterboards made to work with Intel Linux. To this day, I have yet to see a review of them (Say it ain't so, Ars...), or even a reasonably detailed explanation of how the cross-compiling and job execution work. In a somewhat exhaustive Web search, I found more questions and speculation than answers. All of the specific applications mentioned are rendering and other 'dumb' SIMD processes. It's difficult to tell just how versatile these boards might be. Has anyone shelled out the $6k for one of these things and are they willing to share their experiences with the rest of the world? In particular, I wonder if this might come in handy for some Monte Carlo codes that we run where I work, where raw flops are more important than communication or memory, and the parallelism is MIMD."
"Just an explanation of the programming/compiling/execution process would be nice, and inquiries sent to the manufacturer have resulted in sales-type replies which weren't technically helpful."
Re:medal requested for fp (Score:2)
I've been looking for these boards for a while. I remeber seeing them on
They sounded very interesting. I thought it might just have been a hoax like some other multi-processor bords featured on
Many years ago I remember that Microway used to do add-in boards for PC's for doing intensive stuff. They once made a Transputer board, and later on an i860 and then an i960 board with optimising compilers.
Just imagine if, instead of just a 3D accelerator card, you could also for $100 get a high-speed 64-bit risc on a board to accelerate your games etc. I bet they'd sell like hot-cakes in university physics departments and the like where people need to do a lot of FP.
Amiga (Score:4)
There's a load of links at http://www.suite101.com/linkcat egory.cfm/amiga/4027 [suite101.com] if any one's interested.
Basically, the system libraries are all replaced with versions that use the PowerPC for anything remotely complicated, while any older programs just go on using the original processor.
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Re:linuxppc/netbsd --NOT (Score:1)
Noooooo, the per unit cost is not cheaper. $6k for for a four-way parallel 500MHz G4 environment is way cheaper than four G4's, not to mention more useful because of the parallelism.
Bingo Foo
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linuxppc/netbsd (Score:1)
University physics labs + FP (Score:1)
They're for real - check these benchmarks (Score:1)
On uncorrelated processing they seem to scale linearly with number of processors. But if this is the only class of problems they help with, then a beowolf cluster of GHz Duron's would be more economical.
You might inquire on OpenPPC [openppc.com]
Re:They're for real - check these benchmarks (Score:1)
Re:University physics labs + FP (Score:1)
I went to a computer day-camp once... Geeze, I don't even remeber what I did there!!! But I remember seeing *Wolfenstien* running on a *386*!!! Man, was I impressed...
I had to work really hard to get some guy there to give me Scorch [classicgaming.com] on a floppy... and it *was* worth it...
Re:Amiga --NOT (Score:1)
Nooooo, they do not sound like the PowerPC cards for Amiga. Apparently, you need to cross-compile and specially execute code on these.
Bingo Foo
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