Modular Motherboard Concept Shows Potential

Terry Olaes

Terry Olaes

I Used to be the [H] News Guy
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Nov 27, 2006
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A group of like-minded hardware modders have started work on what could be the future of your PC: distributed computing at the hardware level. Dubbed the Illuminato X Machina, it has a cellular model that gets stronger as more modules are added. Most interesting.

The group has created a motherboard prototype that uses separate modules, each of which has its own processor, memory and storage. Each square cell in this design serves as a mini-motherboard and network node; the cells can allocate power and decide to accept or reject incoming transmissions and programs independently. Together, they form a networked cluster with significantly greater power than the individual modules.
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The left one is connected to the right one, the right one is connected to the top one.. the top one is connected to the... uh oh.. :D

Most interesting concept I must add. Could this be a potential future for adding more cores to my processor without all the expensive upgrades !? ( which seems like a sweet idea for video cards too ) :eek: Now my brain is working.. lol
 
this is similiar but more robust version of how the core chips were to run in ps3 and the ones redesigned for xbox...

so the joke about wii being two gc slapped together will apply to ps4 which is rumored to be 2 ps3s slapped together.

making one robust chip, that we can add to is great. whats even greater is if we could flash the chips new instructions to use... so we can make old chips smarter
 
Hmm, slapping two Gigabyte EP45-DS3R's with Q9450's and HD4890's together...
 
This matrix of boards has a strange resemblance to a neural net processor... Hmm...

Well, laptops today are running off of very small boards, so standardizing this as an architecture would be key. But will the connections be clean enough to make systems efficient? Resistance is increased with every connector and it's a bitch...
 
it looks like someone's highschool project, they they are really serious, they will use HSHDC (high speed high desity connector), not the double layer pcb with crappy 8 pin non-feedback connector
 
"We are the Borg..."

Now we just need a few billion of those things to create a cubeship.
 
lame. computers are already modular. but they keep changing the sockets, slots, and compatibilities and everyone has to keep upgrading from one system to another.I'll be impressed when they figure out how to make a system that can be upgraded one piece at a time instead of having to dump a whole system because the only part that is compatible with the new stuff is the case.
 
Still there are many details that need to be worked out. Huynh and his group haven’t yet benchmarked the system against traditional PCs to establish exactly how the two compare in terms of power consumption and speeds. The lack of benchmarking also means that they have no data yet on how the computing power of an X Machina array compares to a PC with an Intel Core 2 Duo chip.
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Yeah, it sure is showing potential when they have not even benchmarked it. :rolleyes: I would be really surprised if you could use 72mhz Arm processors to be faster and cheaper than a single $250 Intel Q9550. This really isn't anything interesting. Supercomputers have been designing clusters like this for years, just with more powerful nodes.
 
siliconnerd said:
Yeah, it sure is showing potential when they have not even benchmarked it. :rolleyes: I would be really surprised if you could use 72mhz Arm processors to be faster and cheaper than a single $250 Intel Q9550. This really isn't anything interesting. Supercomputers have been designing clusters like this for years, just with more powerful nodes.
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Soggy said:
lame. computers are already modular. but they keep changing the sockets, slots, and compatibilities and everyone has to keep upgrading from one system to another.I'll be impressed when they figure out how to make a system that can be upgraded one piece at a time instead of having to dump a whole system because the only part that is compatible with the new stuff is the case.
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You freaking consumerists, you're disgusting.
 
"we are the Borg, lower your shields and surrender your ships. we will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. resistance is futile!" :D
 
Enduring_Warrior said:
You freaking consumerists, you're disgusting.
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How so? It is a lot of hype for nothing. The fact that there hasn't been ANY benchmarks to tell if the concept is even an improvement over anything else before going to the press is dumb. It looks to all be a marketing campaign for their product, which it looks like the prices are insane: http://www.liquidware.com/shop/show/IXM/Illuminato+X+Machina For the price of 16 of them, you could build a full nice quad core system. There is no way that 16 of them would be faster than an Intel Quad core. Even if you are wanting some small embedded solution, for the price of 4, you could get a blackfin development board http://www.analog.com/en/embedded-processing-dsp/blackfin/bf537-stamp/processors/product.html which at 500mhz would still be faster, would actually be capable of running a full embededded OS like uClinux and probably wouldn't use much more power.

The idea of moving away from traditional architectures to keep current growth is an important one, but it can't simply be done at the board level with cheap microcontrollers. It is something that needs to be researched at the IC and architecture level. They are trying to create something to be massively parallel by taking several chips that have not been even designed for parallization and expecting something grand. They would run into the same scaling issues that anyone just throwing extra cores at the problem will and most likely even sooner.

There is much more promising research out there in the computer architecture field. The University of Washington showed a few years back that dataflow machines have a huge potential for scaling massively with WaveScalar: http://wavescalar.cs.washington.edu/ This is the type of research that is needed to break the limitations of core scaling. A large number of micro controllers connected by UART will not do it.
 
Yes interesting idea....but can we take a modular step back a bit?

Can we have a modular plug and connector for the case switches/LEDs to motherboard first?

Thanks.
 
daglesj said:
Yes interesting idea....but can we take a modular step back a bit?

Can we have a modular plug and connector for the case switches/LEDs to motherboard first?

Thanks.
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This. Should have been standardised into a X# pin plug a long time ago :)
 
It's PC104 redux.
Look up PC104 sometime; modular subboard assemblies to create a complete system.
 
What is the point of this thing if you have to connect individual wires to it just to interface with it. You would think they could create IO and power adapters to simplify interfacing with these things.
 
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