What computer/OS are you using?

[Smokey]

Cool... PIII rules... If it's a socket370 instead of a slot processor...

I'm looking for a dual socket370 board with 2 1GHz+ PIIIs... ;010

[Dr. Mario]

Oh, yeah. From my experience, Pentium III Socket 370. However, if you can find a motherboard that supports Rambus RDRAM, you may be able to hide the problem the slot 1 experiences - like slow FSB. RDRAM may be slow and expensive - but while messing around in BIOS' DRAM setting (if you have done it before - do it on this one.) It may be worth it.

[Smokey]

well, there's on for sale online here, but without memory and i happen to know that RDRAM is the rarest type of memory...At least in holland...

[Dr. Mario]

Try eBay. You may be able to obtain them gems cheaply and they usually ship it anywhere.

And I really want the XDR DRAM (XDIMM) memory sticks!!!
The hard part is, I have to wait until they become available, because AMD Phenom II is VERY likely to use this kind of RAM before Core i7 does.

[Smokey]

oh, that's hardly worth the effort...
theres a refurbishing company some 15 miles from here where they disassemble written off computer parks of businesses...
Now there is a gold mine... i worked there for half a year and i've seen stuff ranging from PIIIs to Colour laser printers to 8" floppy drives and 8"HDDs... ;010 all practically for free, since too old systems get scrapped...

[Dr. Mario]

You should get lucky to get this kind of memory. To heighten your luck on obtain used RDRAM, just look at latter PIII and early P4 system, they have it.

[Smokey]

that requires a good dose of luck in these parts, since it was shunned for its high price and low performance bonus over "ordinary" RAM...
Believe me it was flamed HARD in magazines and stores and, well everywhere in holland... shame though...

[Dr. Mario]

Good point, though. Worth a try.
I had a better chance here in USA, and in Japan, though.

Although, the XDR have replaced RDRAM. It's because it's faster and cheaper. (According to Rambus.)

I really want XDR, though. Just 9.6 Gigabytes/seconds each serial links (two leads from each of the corner of XDR chip) is still unbelievably fast - just four of 4GB XDIMM modules on 64-bit x86 would easily clock out at 87GB/s or more at 3.2 GHz memory clock.

[Smokey]

Aww sweet... ;010

I am designing a sort of RAID RAM configuration at this moment...
That'll be a nice challenge: to get the architecture and programming right...

[Dr. Mario]

That would be more like FB-DIMM, interesting still.

[Smokey]

Well, basically it'll be a work around to increase speed of the RAM without having to design a completely new chip...
It's already hard enough designing the thing as it is; with scavenged parts...

[Dr. Mario]

If you don't wanna wait for Phenom II with support for DDR-3 or XDR-DRAM memories, I suggest you first seal pins or balls of memory chip, be it SDRAM, or DDR (any generation) you're using off with RTV, then chill it with peltier or refrigerant then do mean of 2, thus x4 clock speed. Just my idea, based on my experience.

[Smokey]

Well I intend for the system to look roughly like this [see image]
Where the memory banks will be written to simultaneously to quadruple the speed, and the process controller will have to evaluate where to send the instructions to (to wich processing unit).
The processing units themselves consist of 2 processors to wich the instructions will also be equally divided in an attempt to effectively double the clock speed...
It is also my intention to integrate the components in such a way that any idle processor (main PU or GPU) will be able to handle pending instructions as to optimise the MIPS/MFLOPS performance...
Finally the expansion controller will have high speed connectors to wich i can later attach further processing boards or other expansions (video units, IO, Storage etc...) and the IO handler will handle things like USB, LAN etc....

Added after 49 seconds:

Like I said, this is going to be on helluva project...

[attachment deleted by admin]

[Dr. Mario]

... HEY! That seem familiar - more like a x86 Cell (x86 clone of PS3 Cell BE processor)
How about removing PU's ram controllers, and link them to Xilinx Virtec 5 with XDR memory controller, and having host CPU directly controlling linked FPGA and PUs, it could run like a x86 Cell, churning out few TIPS and TeraFLOPS.

Yeah, I'm going to use x86 Cell in NES computer project.

[Smokey]

Good idea, I will try to implement it in my design...
I was also thinking of putting the PUs on a seperate board with a high-speed datalink to the motherboard...
And BTW I didn't know that it was similar to CELL...