AMD alternative toTriplehead multiple screen simming

I've been ignoring hardware for a while... the more I read, the more money I tend
to want to spend. ;-)

So AMD's new generation of vid cards have come as a bit of a surprise. It looks
like we may be able to throw our Triplehead boxes (or plans for a Triplehead box)
out of the window. The money could be better spent on a better vid card...

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3635

These cards won;t be cheap. But knock off the price of a Matrox box and the price
will be a lot more acceptable... as will the reduced power consumption these cards
will (probably) have.

Looks very promising to me... though my idea of promising may have been warped by
the fact I've been looking lustily at 295GTX pricing recently.

Andrew McP

(Ni!!! ßó¶=+?á) wrote:

> Too costly and my desk won't fit that many monitors.

A fair criticism. But as I said a while back, I consider moving to a three screen
setup the best investment I've ever made, without a doubt. And it cost less
(including the vid card to drive it) than the first 17" CRT I bought.

So I'm pretty excited about this, even though Matrox probably aren't. :-)

Andrew McP

Ebola > wrote in
:

> On Fri, 11 Sep 2009 21:19 +0100 (BST),
> (Andrew MacPherson) wrote:
>
>
>>So I'm pretty excited about this, even though Matrox probably aren't.
>>:-)
>>
>>Andrew McP
>
> What I don't understand is why Matrox don't want to spend the R&D to
> plaky with the big boys in the 3D arena. Surely they have the know how
> and money to do it. A 3 way race would be much more fun than just a 2
> way race. I will definelty be getting a 5870 though as it comes with
> 2X performance of my 4870 on paper and pretty much guaranteed 60%
> better performance. That's like running 2x 4870 in Crossfire but just
> on one video card.
>
Maybe it's the Intel/Motorolla rule: At one time as you may know Motorolla
made a competing CPU chip to Intel. the 6800 and 680x0 families. They
made the chip in the first Mac and the later ones - until they reached
about 100Mhz and 64bit. The Motorolla was actually a superior chip - flat
memory model, no 640K-1088K gap problem and internal address/memory busses
as wide as the external busses (unlike some of Intels pre-pentium chips),
but Intel had a larger market share. So Motorolla had to stop making the
chip. They didn't have enough profit to justify any more development.

On Sat, 12 Sep 2009 21:19:58 -0700, Zygocactus wrote:
> Yes, I remember the Motorola cpu, it was a Risc cpu. I started
> computing on Mac and not PC running desktop publishing apps back in
> 1989. My Sega Genesis had a Motrola cpu in to too (660?).

Dunno about yours but mine certainly were CISC cpu's, you may be
mixing them up with the later MIPS chips. 6809E was the first chip to
handle 16 bits in 2 cpu registers (powered my Dragon 64, that one ;-).

All the best,

Uwe

Uwe > wrote in
:

> On Sat, 12 Sep 2009 21:19:58 -0700, Zygocactus wrote:
>> Yes, I remember the Motorola cpu, it was a Risc cpu. I started
>> computing on Mac and not PC running desktop publishing apps back in
>> 1989. My Sega Genesis had a Motrola cpu in to too (660?).
>
> Dunno about yours but mine certainly were CISC cpu's, you may be
> mixing them up with the later MIPS chips. 6809E was the first chip to
> handle 16 bits in 2 cpu registers (powered my Dragon 64, that one ;-).
>
Yup. Completely different line. Rather strange actually considering I
explicitly mentioned the actual CPU's involved. But nymshifting trolls
aren't terribly good at reading comprehension. They can't be.

Uwe wrote:

> Dunno about yours but mine certainly were CISC cpu's, you may be
> mixing them up with the later MIPS chips. 6809E was the first chip to
> handle 16 bits in 2 cpu registers (powered my Dragon 64, that one ;-).
>
> All the best,
>
> Uwe
>

Cisc/Risc, it's all the same to me. FAIL.

APLer wrote:

>>
> Yup. Completely different line. Rather strange actually considering I
> explicitly mentioned the actual CPU's involved. But nymshifting trolls
> aren't terribly good at reading comprehension. They can't be.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/88000

History

Originally called the 78000 as a homage to their famed 68000 series, the
design went though a tortured development path, including the name
change, before finally emerging in April 1988.

In the late 1980s several companies were actively watching the 88000 for
future use, including NeXT, Apple Computer and Apollo Computer, but all
gave up by the time the 88110 was available in 1990.

There was an attempt to popularize the system with the 88open group,
similar to what Sun Microsystems was attempting with their SPARC design.
It appears to have failed in any practical sense.[1]

In the early 1990s Motorola joined the AIM effort to create a new RISC
design based on the IBM POWER design. They worked a few features of the
88000 into the new PowerPC design to offer their customer base some sort
of upgrade path. At that point the 88000 was dumped as soon as possible.[2]

[edit] Architecture

Like the 68000 before it, the 88000 was considered to be a very "clean"
design. It was a pure 32-bit load/store architecture, using separate
instruction and data caches (Harvard architecture), and separate data
and address buses. It had a small but powerful command set, and, like
all Motorola CPUs, did not use memory segmentation.

A major architectural mistake was that both integer instructions and
floating-point instructions used the same register file. This required
that the single register file to have sufficient read and write ports to
support both the integer execution unit and the floating-point unit. The
connections for each port is an additional capacitive load that must be
driven by register memory cell. This made it more difficult to build
high frequency superscalar implementations.

[edit] Implementations
Motorola 88100 RISC CPU

The first implementation of the 88000 design was in the 88100 CPU, which
included an integrated FPU. Mated to this was the 88200 MMU and cache
controller. The idea behind this splitting of duties was to allow
multiprocessor systems to be built more easily; a single 88200 could
support up to four 88100's. However, this also meant that building the
most basic system, with a single processor, required both chips and
considerable wiring between them, driving up costs. This is likely
another major reason for the 88000's limited success.
Motorola 88110 RISC CPU

This was later addressed in the superscalar 88110, which combined the
CPU, FPU, MMU, and L1 cache into a single package. An additional
modification, made at the behest of MIT's *T project, resulted in the
88110MP, including on-chip communications for use in multi-processor
systems.[3] A version capable of speeds up to 100 MHz was planned as the
88120, but was never built.

An implementation for embedded applications, the 88300, was under
development during the early 1990s, but was eventually cancelled. Ford
was the only design win, and they were offered a PowerPC design as a
replacement, which they accepted.

Though sometimes referred to as A88k, the Apollo PRISM is not related to
the Motorola 88000.[4]

[edit] Products and applications
MVME-197LE

Motorola released a series of single-board computers, known as the MVME
series, for building "out of the box" systems based on the 88000, as
well as the Series 900 stackable computers employing these MVME boards.
Unlike tower or rack mount systems, the Series 900 sat on top of each
other and connected to one another with bus-like cabling. The concept
never caught on.

NCD used the 88100 (without the 88200) in its 88K X-Terminals. The 88110
made it into some versions of a never released NeXT machine, the NeXT
RISC Workstation, but the project was canceled along with all NeXT
hardware projects in 1993. The 4-processor OMRON luna88k machines from
Japan used the m88k, and were used for a short time on the Mach kernel
project at Carnegie Mellon University. A number of similar smaller
systems were also built, but none are widely known.

In the embedded computer space, the "Tri-channel VMS Computer" in the
F-15_S/MTD used three 88000s in a triply-redundant computer.[5]

Major users were limited. The only widespread third-party computer use
would be in the Data General AViiON series. These were fairly popular,
and remain in limited use today. Encore Computer built their Encore-91
machine on the m88k, then introduced a completely ground-up redesign as
the Infinity 90 series, but it is unclear how many of these machines
were sold. In the early 1990s Northern Telecom used the 88100 and 88110
as the central processor in its DMS SuperNode family of telephone
switches. All of these users were forced to move to other processors
when Motorola later gave up on the m88k; DG went to Intel, Encore to the
Alpha.

GEC Computers used the 88100 to build the GEC 4310, one of the GEC 4000
series computers, but issues with memory management meant it didn't
perform as well as their earlier gate array based and Am2900 based GEC
4000 series computers, and no more GEC systems were design using the
88000 family.

Linotype-Hell used the 88110 in their "Power" workstations running the
DaVinci raster graphics editor for image manipulation.

Dolphin Server, a spin-off from the dying Norsk Data built servers based
on the 88k. Around 100 systems were shipped during 1988-1992.

(Andrew MacPherson) wrote:

> Looks very promising to me

Here's an entertaining look behind the scenes at Nvidia. ;-)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FR45ja_fNzU

Andrew McP

(Andrew MacPherson) wrote:

> Looks very promising to me

It also looks like ATI managed the flow of information pretty cleverly. The
implication was that an adapter (possibly a cheap one) might allow the use of a
third monitor. The official line now seems to be that this isn't the case. And the
chances of anyone having displayports on their existing monitors are roughly one in
a bazillion.

Nice card, good power consumption & performance, but pretty disappointing
multi-screen hype. Such is the nature of pre-release marketing I guess. Welcome to
the 21st century. :-)

Andrew McP

Andrew MacPherson wrote:
> I've been ignoring hardware for a while... the more I read, the more money I tend
> to want to spend. ;-)
>
> So AMD's new generation of vid cards have come as a bit of a surprise. It looks
> like we may be able to throw our Triplehead boxes (or plans for a Triplehead box)
> out of the window. The money could be better spent on a better vid card...
>
> http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3635
>
> These cards won;t be cheap. But knock off the price of a Matrox box and the price
> will be a lot more acceptable... as will the reduced power consumption these cards
> will (probably) have.

Cool stuff! Now let's hope ATI drivers have catched up a bit on
stability, compared to nVidia.

Ruud