A New Motherboard Specification Designed by Facebook

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A new motherboard specification designed by Facebook and it's called "group hug?"

“Group Hug” board: Facebook is contributing a new common slot architecture specification for motherboards. This specification — which we’ve nicknamed “Group Hug” — can be used to produce boards that are completely vendor-neutral and will last through multiple processor generations. The specification uses a simple PCIe x8 connector to link the SOCs to the board.
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I'm guessing that biodegradable computer components probably won't be very popular among consumers.
 
That PCIe x8 connector sounds entirely inadequate for proper expansion connectivity.
 
Is this a replacement for Blade servers? Or is it more of "add processing power with a single card"? If it's more like a blade and you add servers to a standard form factor, ok, nothing interesting. But, if you can add processing power and multiple CPU's to a single server (same OS, etc.), then it would be cool.
 
oh please.....

If this it's what "modern 21st century" is going to be about......It might just be time to hang up my keyboard.
 
I think the original name was "Slot Orgy" but they had to tone it down.
 
vsboxerboy said:
https://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150148003778920
https://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150144796738920

Sheds some more light on the issue. Basically Facebook deals with such a large volume of servers that they can get hardware manufacturers to work with them on creating more efficient designs - things like DC direct to the server instead of AC -> DC -> AC -> DC.
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So you get a building rectifier and order the servers/transport equipment/whatever with DC input modules instead of the AC PSU modules.

Problem solved and no need for some new standard.
 
while nothing new.. the backplane idea has been around a long time.. the name? REALLY WTF?

who would want to admit to being part of a project called "group hug"? sounds like some bad social media experiment.. oh wait..
 
BWAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

The S100 Bus lives again! Its ALIVE!


Or at least the concept thereof. Group hug, or, how we did it in 1976...
 
dgingeri said:
That PCIe x8 connector sounds entirely inadequate for proper expansion connectivity.
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for a server farm node? I think 63gbits of bandwith should be fine
 
Parja said:
Right. This isn't a "new motherboard specification" because it's not a motherboard.
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I agree. Back in the lat 90s/early 00s,, you could buy PCI backplanes with a dozen-or-so slots and build your own computer. Vendors built Single Board Computers containing CPU/bridge chips/ram on a single PCI card. You plugged that into the backplane, and whatever else you wanted, and BAM - you had a completely custom computer.

You could upgrade the system by just swapping out the Single Board Computer, but now the backplane is PCIe.
 
I will add to my post above that this is not as trivial as "shared bus" backplanes of old - you have to do some serious design to get the right balance of PCIe slots and interconnect, as the bus is point-to-point.

But in the end it's just remodeling an ancient idea (PCI backplanes were not the first, and this Facebook creation is certainly not the last).
 
I actually like this concept. I hate how you can't upgrade a single component anymore. Any new CPU that comes out requires a new socket. Ram, new slot. Even stuff like video cards. PCI, AGP, like 5 varians of PCI-e, PCI-X There's too many different slots. Need more uniformity so that stuff can be more modular. Mind you lately things seem to have settled but for how long.

Their design looks interesting for multi node servers as well. Looks like the server in the pic is 3 nodes in one chassis. So in 2U of space, you actually have 3 servers. While the name they chose is kinda laughable, I do hope to see this concept take off and at an affordable price. And stay open and not turn into some proprietary stuff that 3 years after the warranty you're out of luck.
 
Sounds like they took terradata and facebookified it.
 
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