Does anyone have experience with building modern processor boards?
I want to remove the uncertainties (primarily long term availability) with using COTS boards in my system, and also to reduce the design from two boards (motherboard + "special sauce" board to a single, combined, board.
An Intel socket 775 P4 board that does what I need it to (from a processor and PCI Express bus perspective), today, costs $80. If I can build it for 2x that, and include my sauce, it will be worth it.
High speed digital design and tight constraints PCBs I can handle. Very good design guys here.
What hurdles do you think I will hit going this route?
I have heard chipset availability for the little guy (1K units/qtr) can tough.
I have heard that processor sockets are v.expensive, again for the little guy.
BIOS I'm not worried about. General Software, Inc. looks good.
I know this group is primarily microcontrollers, but I hope there's someone out there with "big processor" experience too.
Thanks, Paul.
P.S. 3GHz class P4 or Athlon64 is a hard requirement, so I'm not looking for alternate "embedded x86" or PowerPC type advice (although other people may find such advice useful, so go ahead!)