On Fri, 1 Dec 2000, Steve Woodford wrote:

> > This is the coolest I've seen yet:
> > 
> > http://www.general-micro-systems.com/v56.html
> 
> That *is* a nice board. It's a bit too different to the motorola mvme68k
> boards for NetBSD/mvme68k to support it.

It says it's pin and function compatible IIRC, implying the same software
would work.

> However, if someone wants to send
> me one, I could get a new port: "NetBSD/gmsvme68k" running on it within a
> month or two... ;-)  (That's the theory anyway; in reality, I simply can't
> spare the time now or for the foreseeable future).

Life.... sucks.

> Looks like it uses the same P2 pinout as Motorola's MVME712 rear
> transition module. That's a board which connects to the back of the VMEbus
> P2 connector and provides a panel with scsi, aui, printer and serial
> ports.

Ahah. Neat.

> > It'd be fairly neat for me to have a load of CPU cards on a backplane
> > communicating TCP/IP over said backplane... that'd make a great
> > extensible falloverable cluster.
> 
> Indeed, but VME devices usually command a premium price. I suspect the
> "V56" would be in the $4000-$6000 range if GMS are competing with
> motorola's offerings. Still, 

Really? Dang. I thought the presence of so many clones would have brought
prices down, but I must confess that the fact that the web sites never
show prices had struck me as a bad portent.

If those guys dropped their prices they ought to be able to take the
server market by storm. People will pay a lot for hardware that fits
densely into racks with minimal heat output, and x86 hardware isn't the
way to go for that.

> 
> Cheers, Steve
> 

Thanks,

ABS

-- 
                               Alaric B. Snell
 http://www.alaric-snell.com/  http://RFC.net/  http://www.warhead.org.uk/
   Any sufficiently advanced technology can be emulated in software