Rob Blessin at Black Hole Inc., Ft. Collins, CO (www.blackholeinc.com), started this idea some years ago: the Super Cube. He had some modest success putting an Intel board inside a cube. BUT IBM recently announced an 80 core processor chip. News in the SF Chronicle (or sfgate.com) today 6/28, Intel announced (what?) 10 or 20 core processors(?). Apple's been fielding 4 cores, if I remember right. And there may be 8 cores 'out there' somewhere already at consumer prices. (Sorry about the facts accuracy...)
I wonder if this group has or can get a hold of both the schematics (in print and as digital CAD-EE files) for the NeXT cube motherboard, the ND board, and the 5 DSP board as well as the fabrication specifications for those boards. Need I say more? I will...
With a redesigned and re-fab'd mother board, ND board, and 5-DSP board, we could get super computers inside our cubes! Better than a rack of XServers? Perhaps! And with really good design, likely we could swap, say, a 4-core for an 8-core processor, etc. up and past 80-cores in the future. Then there's the concept of multiple state-of-art DSPs on a board? Wow! Some OStep kernal patches required. MacOS X & Darwin... probably not...
A few original connectors on each of the newly-fab'd boards plus the 'new' connectors (USB, FWire... Flat Panel/DVI). We could keep doing this for years! And still use some of the old NeXT gear...
Then there's the 'pizza box' mother-board schematics & specs... Need I say more? I won't...
Jenni W, 62, SF by SF State U.
'cubed' since 88, Darwin'd of late...
www.weblearningtools.org
Quote from: "jenniwoo"
I wonder if this group has or can get a hold of both the schematics (in print and as digital CAD-EE files) for the NeXT cube motherboard, the ND board, and the 5 DSP board as well as the fabrication specifications for those boards.
...
A few original connectors on each of the newly-fab'd boards plus the 'new' connectors (USB, FWire... Flat Panel/DVI). We could keep doing this for years! And still use some of the old NeXT gear...
Have a look around the rest of the forums. Some of us are already working at this. Do you have any HW to contribute?
-- josé k.
Jennifer-Welcome!
Cool ideas except openstep doesnt work with more than 1 cpu, at least the versions released to the public. so it'd have to be a newer OS.
I'd love to have a cube with a redesigned motherboard allowing for like maybe a fast x86 chip or power6 or something with a sister chip doing on the fly translation between 68k and whatever the main cpu is with a fast memory system. Add firewire, usb, maybe fibre channel for the hdd. spin a custom OS4.2 cd with drivers for all this and...
*sigh*
I think it's a very bad idea to alienate a nice piece of hw :evil: If somebody wants zillion cores and lots of gigahertzs then the way is clear - buy a peecee or mac or whatever. This monster won't be NeXT Cube or Station anymore :cry:
Trying to develop hw options with newer technology is ok. This is the only way for a NeXT machine to remain a NeXT with its true feeling ...
From another thread here we do have some specifications on the NeXT RISC workstation prototype, so that is what I would like to see someone try to build. Unfortunately there probably is not enough info about how some of the chips were programmed, or a working copy of the BIOS available, to make this a reality.
I would like to see this done before the above mentioned system, as it is a product we know NeXT was preparing to move foreward with before the end of the hardware side.
Chef
Two other interesting Super Cube projects might be to either try to rig up a motherboard based on a 68060 or ColdFire with the associated glue, or an x86 motherboard specifically designed for running NS/OS.
Another one might be a 4-arch Cube. One HPPA 7100LC (120/180MHz), one SuperSPARC (90, or could someone make a faster one now? I wanna say the Verilog for the superSPARC core is out there), one x86 (Turion64? Core 2 Solo? Opteron?) and a 68040 (Could you clock a newer-core 040 above 33MHz? Maybe even up to 166 0r so, and glue on more cache?). No room for an ND, but then, what would stop someone from implementing essentially a Turbo Color Slab on a card that could fit into a Cube?
Someone pass the crack-pipe around, please...
Kronoman is the only one with an realistically feasible idea, and it's pretty good too, although that would be one costly cube to make!! :)
Quote from: "da9000"Someone pass the crack-pipe around, please...
Kronoman is the only one with an realistically feasible idea, and it's pretty good too, although that would be one costly cube to make!! :)
We can all dream a little, cant we ... :D
A cube with all 4 NS capable architectures in it would be a very interesting conversation piece.
Chef
Quote from: "nextchef"
We can all dream a little, cant we ... :D
Maybe you were dreaming, but some others were clearly smoking :D