You don't need them to run at 16x. It's ok with a PCIe switch. I got into this whole mining craze but I have a feeling I'm burning more money on electricity than I'm getting back. And with that whole initial investment... Woo wee...
A lot of miners mine on Linux. Baytrail support is still bad in Linux. Do they have a custom Linux image that is patched for Baytrail and is stable? Or is this Windows only? Kind of defeats cost cutting measures if you have to pay for a Windows license.
The only problems I know about were related to some of those CPUs sitting on motherboards where you needed a 32bit EFI bootloader to then load a 64bit OS. That's still a little bit of a frustration today but there are even PeachNCream-proof guides out there to step a person through the process (trust me, if it's me-proof anyone can do it). The other problem that's now been solved was getting Linux to play better with eMMC storage that tended to get paired with Bay Trail. Linux was totally not ready for that when it happened back in Bay Trail's early days so it made OS boot times really long, but that's been fixed for a long time and its not even really a problem on this mining board since it uses mSATA and SATA.
Any idea if the computer portion would run in a normal PCIE slot in another computer? might be nice for those people that want multiple computers in one box/use one power supply.
Otherwise, general purpose CPUs on expansion boards are rare. Back in the 90s, Apple, Sun, etc. made x86 coprocessor boards because software emulation wasn't fast enough yet. Speaking of Apple in that era, a third-party named Radius made a general purpose coprocessor product called "Rocket" that found limited success.
More recently, Intel's Xeon Phi CPU design started life as a PCIe board ("Knights Corner") and in the current version ("Knights Landing") the processor supports both a PCIe mode and a self-hosting mode. Guess what? There wasn't enough demand for the PCIe version, so Intel canceled the product.
At the moment, Intel sells a product called "Visual Compute Accelerator 2" which places three Xeon GPUs with integrated graphics onto a single PCIe board. Its kind of cool, but the target market seems to be real-time H.264/H.265 transcoding by data centers, so I wouldn't get too invested in the general idea.
The fundamental problem with general purpose coprocessor boards is that there isn't a standardized way for programmers and operating systems to reason about them. Everything ends up being super custom, and self-limiting as a consequence.
This is cool, but it’s really strange they decided to use a 5 year old chip instead of something recent like Apollo Lake (J3060 or so) from last year. Not that the performance really matters but there are some substantial improvements to IME and the networking aspect that would be articulately beneficial for this type of a platform.
Well, if the purpose isn't CPU bound, then plug in whatever CPU you can get cheapest. The J1900's aren't bad little chips at all. The thing is, if you look at the PCIe... backplane(?) for lack of a better word, if at any time they decided to change the CPU they probably could by just laying out a new daughter card which plugs into the large backplane.
The main concern would be the lack of VT-D missing from the J1900 but present in the J3000’s. This allows better VM integration to the PCIe switch. If I were putting a rack of these together I’d really want to have everything in remote managed VM’s. Building just one...probably doesn’t make a big difference.
Well, I guess it depends on what you're going to be running it for. If you're talking about VMs and using it for different purposes other than just mining, then I guess VT-d would be useful. However, if you're going to make a rack of these just for one purpose - mining - then you're only running a single OS on it and then just remote into the specific board running the single running OS to manage things.
Also, again, if they wanted to, they COULD almost build some CPU cards mounted with some lower power Xeons which certainly provide the VT-d services and would certainly be more capable of powering several simultaneous VMs. Ultimately, if enough people contact Colorful about it and there's enough demand, perhaps they would be willing to spec up a few thousand boards.
There's something that rubs me the wrong way about "mining" - it's just converting electricity and time to tokens, with no real value added. It's just a fiat currency in digital form and it repeats the same stupid mistakes inherent in real-world fiat currencies.
Distributed processing for SETI or protein folding is a form of distributed mining with real value. No dollar value is assigned to these activities no matter how beneficial they may be to humanity. What a messed up world we live in...
Sounds like an opportunity. Someone should make an alt-coin that somehow calculates something useful while being mined. I have no idea if a blockchain can even do thought though.
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ImSpartacus - Friday, November 10, 2017 - link
I get that the PCIe slots are in the 16x form factor, but they aren't actually running at 16x data rates, are they?jagilbertvt - Friday, November 10, 2017 - link
The j1900 only has 4x PCIe 2.0 lanes, so even if they are x8/x16, they must be using a PCIe switch for connectivity between the CPU and GPUs.ddrіver - Sunday, November 12, 2017 - link
You don't need them to run at 16x. It's ok with a PCIe switch. I got into this whole mining craze but I have a feeling I'm burning more money on electricity than I'm getting back. And with that whole initial investment... Woo wee...keebs63 - Friday, November 10, 2017 - link
No, but they don't need to be. Mining takes very little data bandwidth, a 2.0 x1 data rate is more than enough as far as I'm aware.stuffwhy - Friday, November 10, 2017 - link
They are most likely 1x slots, electrically.Elstar - Friday, November 10, 2017 - link
Yup. All of these ASIC-resistant/memory-hard alt-coins are friendly to PCIe x1 GPU mining configurations.Mo3tasm - Friday, November 10, 2017 - link
So, what theoretical hash rate can this thing achieve?jordanclock - Friday, November 10, 2017 - link
Whatever the best GPU can do times eight.MonkeyPaw - Friday, November 10, 2017 - link
Don't forget about all that power in the 10W BayTrail Celeron! :DRo_Ja - Saturday, November 11, 2017 - link
Nah this is strictly GPU's task.ImSpartacus - Saturday, November 11, 2017 - link
He means the 10W in overhead needs to be calculated in the total hash/W rate.skavi - Sunday, November 12, 2017 - link
Pretty sure it was just a joke.JackTheBear - Friday, November 10, 2017 - link
A lot of miners mine on Linux. Baytrail support is still bad in Linux. Do they have a custom Linux image that is patched for Baytrail and is stable? Or is this Windows only? Kind of defeats cost cutting measures if you have to pay for a Windows license.fackamato - Friday, November 10, 2017 - link
What Baytrail Linux issues?PeachNCream - Saturday, November 11, 2017 - link
The only problems I know about were related to some of those CPUs sitting on motherboards where you needed a 32bit EFI bootloader to then load a 64bit OS. That's still a little bit of a frustration today but there are even PeachNCream-proof guides out there to step a person through the process (trust me, if it's me-proof anyone can do it). The other problem that's now been solved was getting Linux to play better with eMMC storage that tended to get paired with Bay Trail. Linux was totally not ready for that when it happened back in Bay Trail's early days so it made OS boot times really long, but that's been fixed for a long time and its not even really a problem on this mining board since it uses mSATA and SATA.MrSpadge - Friday, November 10, 2017 - link
I wish all this mining specific hardware would benefit regular GP-GPu crunchers. But those PCIe speeds are too low for most applications.muigleb - Friday, November 10, 2017 - link
Any idea if the computer portion would run in a normal PCIE slot in another computer? might be nice for those people that want multiple computers in one box/use one power supply.fackamato - Friday, November 10, 2017 - link
VS VM?extide - Friday, November 10, 2017 - link
No, that is likely only physically PCIe, but electrically proprietary.Elstar - Saturday, November 11, 2017 - link
If you want shared resources, then blade servers are the way to go: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blade_serverOtherwise, general purpose CPUs on expansion boards are rare. Back in the 90s, Apple, Sun, etc. made x86 coprocessor boards because software emulation wasn't fast enough yet. Speaking of Apple in that era, a third-party named Radius made a general purpose coprocessor product called "Rocket" that found limited success.
More recently, Intel's Xeon Phi CPU design started life as a PCIe board ("Knights Corner") and in the current version ("Knights Landing") the processor supports both a PCIe mode and a self-hosting mode. Guess what? There wasn't enough demand for the PCIe version, so Intel canceled the product.
At the moment, Intel sells a product called "Visual Compute Accelerator 2" which places three Xeon GPUs with integrated graphics onto a single PCIe board. Its kind of cool, but the target market seems to be real-time H.264/H.265 transcoding by data centers, so I wouldn't get too invested in the general idea.
The fundamental problem with general purpose coprocessor boards is that there isn't a standardized way for programmers and operating systems to reason about them. Everything ends up being super custom, and self-limiting as a consequence.
ianmills - Friday, November 10, 2017 - link
NoiceSamus - Saturday, November 11, 2017 - link
This is cool, but it’s really strange they decided to use a 5 year old chip instead of something recent like Apollo Lake (J3060 or so) from last year. Not that the performance really matters but there are some substantial improvements to IME and the networking aspect that would be articulately beneficial for this type of a platform.bill.rookard - Saturday, November 11, 2017 - link
Well, if the purpose isn't CPU bound, then plug in whatever CPU you can get cheapest. The J1900's aren't bad little chips at all. The thing is, if you look at the PCIe... backplane(?) for lack of a better word, if at any time they decided to change the CPU they probably could by just laying out a new daughter card which plugs into the large backplane.Samus - Sunday, November 12, 2017 - link
The main concern would be the lack of VT-D missing from the J1900 but present in the J3000’s. This allows better VM integration to the PCIe switch. If I were putting a rack of these together I’d really want to have everything in remote managed VM’s. Building just one...probably doesn’t make a big difference.bill.rookard - Sunday, November 12, 2017 - link
Well, I guess it depends on what you're going to be running it for. If you're talking about VMs and using it for different purposes other than just mining, then I guess VT-d would be useful. However, if you're going to make a rack of these just for one purpose - mining - then you're only running a single OS on it and then just remote into the specific board running the single running OS to manage things.Also, again, if they wanted to, they COULD almost build some CPU cards mounted with some lower power Xeons which certainly provide the VT-d services and would certainly be more capable of powering several simultaneous VMs. Ultimately, if enough people contact Colorful about it and there's enough demand, perhaps they would be willing to spec up a few thousand boards.
serendip - Sunday, November 12, 2017 - link
There's something that rubs me the wrong way about "mining" - it's just converting electricity and time to tokens, with no real value added. It's just a fiat currency in digital form and it repeats the same stupid mistakes inherent in real-world fiat currencies.Distributed processing for SETI or protein folding is a form of distributed mining with real value. No dollar value is assigned to these activities no matter how beneficial they may be to humanity. What a messed up world we live in...
Mr Perfect - Monday, November 13, 2017 - link
Sounds like an opportunity. Someone should make an alt-coin that somehow calculates something useful while being mined. I have no idea if a blockchain can even do thought though.ikeke1 - Wednesday, November 15, 2017 - link
Gridcoin gives tokens for donating computer time to distributed computing/BOINC projects.Chicken76 - Monday, November 13, 2017 - link
I wonder why they put 2 NICs there.