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Looking for PC104 board with > 300 MHz CPU

Hi there,

I'm looking around for a PC104 board with a fast processor and perhaps one that has separate memory for the graphics chip. The system I have right now is based on the Cyrix MediaMX chipset @ 300 MHz and shares the main memory with the video chip. Unfortunately, this isn't fast enough for my application, and I need something faster. It has to conform to the PC104 form factor since I already have an enclosure made up for it.

Any suggestions?

Thanks,

Scott

Reply to
Scott G.
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I'm not sure if this is in the realm of what you're looking for, but there are some fairly fast embedded boards for sale at

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but not all of them necessarily have PC/104 connectors (although some are that approximate form factor). Some of their boards use Pentium3-M up to

700Mhz, Transmeta Crusoe up to 600Mhz, and VIA C3 at 667Mhz.

If you could take a bigger board, you could look at Mini-ITX systems, which can have VIA C3/Eden CPUs up to 1Ghz. These boards are 170mm square; look at

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good luck, Jonathan

Reply to
Jonathan

I have not looked at the website, but the PC/104 Embedded Solutions magazine has a bunch of ads from companies with fast PC/104 boards. The web site is

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Rick "rickman" Collins

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Arius - A Signal Processing Solutions Company
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Reply to
rickman

I'd go further than this and state that raw MHz numbers are almost meaningless. The CPU has to be evaluated in the context of the system into which you intend to build it; this means the surrounding bridge and peripheral ICs and your chosen operating system's capability to exploit whatever features the hardware happens to have. I daresay the OP wasn't planning to make his own board; he wants to buy one, which means he can choose the CPU, but he has to live with someone else's choice of chipsets glued onto that CPU.

Our application is HIGHLY motion-video-intensive. We happen to get better results on a 400MHz Via C3 board with an AGP shared-memory graphics chip that's well-supported by Linux than on a 667MHz C3 board with an unsupported chipset.

Even if someone points you at a board that has all the grunt you could ever want, it's not much use if your operating system of choice can't make efficient use of it (e.g. due to closed-source drivers and other drivel).

Benchmark numbers are, IMHO, useful only for people who intend to use their system for nothing besides running benchmarks. Maybe they're useful to a few raw number-crunching apps as well, but in most cases those grunty apps need fat data pipes in and out of the program, which means they rely on a good disk/network/whatever subsystem - so once more the CPU-to-CPU comparison, alone, is pointless.

Reply to
Lewin A.R.W. Edwards

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