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Compact-PCI format motherboards?

C

cheesehead

Lifer
Having seen many deals on compact-PCI and PICMG format single-board-computers, I wanted to know how they work. Considering that two 600mhz SBCs and a backplane can be had for under 100$, it would seem that they would be an interesting way to make a cheap server. (After all, with twelve PCI slots, why not just use a bunch of cheap NICs and a SATA card for storage?)
 
CompactPCI x86 single board computers (at least those we make) are just your ordinary PC, with lots of features crammed onto the main board. The backplane is a PCI expansion bus; so if you want to plug two SBCs, one of them will have to be capable to run as a peripheral board, not a system CPU. This will not be a dual-CPU system then, but two systems running in one chassis - one "owning" the expansion backplane, the other being isolated from it.

If you're buying those used, take care that you get the "rear I/O module" boards as well. This is where most of the usual I/O ports are, and if you don't have it, you won't get far.

CompactPCI slots are electrically PCI, but they're mechanically quite different.

PICMG are computer-in-a-slot that takes you straight to standard PCI and ISA slots, desktop form factor. It's just a modular approach to building a non-rugged computer. Here, you get to use your ordinary PCI cards.
 
I work with Compact-PCI embedded systems daily. I do board support software for airplane computers. I'm not really sure where CompactPCI is being used, but it's very useful to us as backplane communication between boards is often a necessity, and something better than, say, ethernet is a requirement 😉.
 
Sure, if the SBCs run as peripherals, you can use their bus interface bridge chips as a physical layer for network connections, running either peer-to-peer access into other peripheral SBCs, or using a shared memory location in the system host's RAM.

Incidentally, my uni thesis was on shared-memory network transport, eleven years ago. Man I'm old 😉
 
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