Subject: Re: [linux-audio-dev] ppc linux audio
From: John Lazzaro (lazzaro_AT_CS.Berkeley.EDU)
Date: Wed Jun 28 2000 - 22:14:18 EEST
> One thing that is big on my wish list is a silent computer. I have
> heard that iMacs don't use a fan. A daw based on pentiums can never be
> fanless, but maybe a ppc based system could.
A new trend we're starting to see is to make rack-mount systems out
of laptop components, with the goal of reducing heat density of large
clusters of machine. The motivation for most of these projects is
increasing "CPU/network density" on the machine-room floor, rather
than eliminating fans -- but one could imagine taking the same
approach for making fan-free rackmounts that cool like a laptop cools,
fan free.
Here's a slide from a research project (iStore) at Berkeley that
should make the idea clearer:
http://iram.cs.berkeley.edu/istore/talks/lucent-jan00/sld014.htm
The idea is to take the "disk brick" that holds a single disk drive
in a RAID tray, and to design a motherboard that slips into the brick
next to the disk drive, that uses (mostly) laptop components. Fans
are external to the brick. Since each RAID tray holds 8 bricks, the
computational density is significantly greater than using 1-U rack
mount computers ... its quite impressive to hold one of these bricks
in your hand, and realize it has 4 100Mb NICS, 18 GBytes of disk,
256 Mbytes RAM, and a PII/266Mhz (laptop) ...
--jl
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John Lazzaro -- Research Specialist -- CS Division -- EECS -- UC Berkeley
lazzaro [at] cs [dot] berkeley [dot] edu www.cs.berkeley.edu/~lazzaro
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