mips board

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ddc · Post by **ddc** » Sun Dec 16, 2007 1:16 pm

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MorpheuS.Ibis · Post by **MorpheuS.Ibis** » Sun Dec 16, 2007 1:59 pm

i guess that routerboards are not really designed for server usage (well, maybe the rb1000 that is about to come out) so there is no real point of running gentoo on them as they are targeted for routing and mikrotik makes a perfect OS for them... the rb532A (that is probably the one you have in your hands) could be usable as minimal server with a large CF card...
but again, routerboard is not designed for server usage as they have almost no disk space...

EDIT: gentoo/mips project is mainly aimed to SGI machines, so that should be the choice for mips hardware

ddc · Post by **ddc** » Sun Dec 16, 2007 4:19 pm

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MorpheuS.Ibis · Post by **MorpheuS.Ibis** » Sun Dec 16, 2007 5:42 pm

ddc wrote:i am looking for a modern MIPS board with PCI slot, socketed ram
is there anything "good" ?

wikipedia says that the most powerful MIPS processors are R10000, R12000, R14000 and R16000 used in SGI cluster/servers some years ago.
but they are probably really hard to get and way too expensive.

i don't have any real experience with non-x86 archs (hard to get around here, not counting routerboards and other embedded mips or PPC, ARM PDAs with linux support and gaming consoles) so i can tell you nothing you couldn't get from google...

widan · Post by **widan** » Wed Dec 26, 2007 4:34 pm

ddc wrote:i run gentoo on sgi indy/impact/octane: none of them are really "good" to be considered for the future: 'cause they are old design machine, not modern, not expandible

Another problem is the heat and noise output, which can be quite high for the more powerful machines. For Octanes the PCI card cage is impossible to find and was only really meant for some specific cards provided by SGI (mostly SCSI and Fiber Channel for disk arrays).

ddc wrote:I am looking for a modern MIPS board with PCI slot, socketed ram is there anything "good" ?

The Broadcom Swarm (BCM91250A) board has a 800 MHz dual core MIPS SB-1 CPU, PCI64 and DDR RAM. Or the PMC Sequoia reference board (1GHz single core, PCI32, DDR). Unfortunately the price of either of these is probably way too high for an individual to afford.

Else there is this thing (based on a chinese-designed MIPS3 CPU running at 660 MHz, DDR SO-DIMM, no PCI but standard VIA PC southbridge). No idea on how to get this outside of China.