Saturday, September 19th 2009

DFI Mashes Two Systems into One, Rolls out Hybrid Motherboard

The term 'Hybrid' these days probably relates most to hybrid cars. DFI has taken the concept of two machines - a high-power one, and an energy-efficient one, to a whole new level with its Hybrid P45-ION-T2A2 socket LGA 775 motherboard. This motherboard literally packs two motherboards sharing a PCB: one P45+ICH10R based socket LGA-775 system, and another portion holding an Intel Atom processor powered by NVIDIA ION chipset. Each has its own memory and storage subsystems, and share the machine's IO (input devices and display) in a somewhat KVM-style. So even as the major system is busy playing games, transcoding media, or running other power-hungry tasks, the minor system is quietly running the downloads, playing music, etc. When the major system is not needed, the minor system provides enough juice for media consumption and internet browsing, and general productivity at a really low energy footprint. A pretty neat concept. DFI's engineers describe it further in this YouTube video.
Source: TweakTown
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82 Comments on DFI Mashes Two Systems into One, Rolls out Hybrid Motherboard

#76
Mussels
Freshwater Moderator
hatWouldn't this be the same thing as running a virtual machine... just not so... virtual?
not really. you cant shut down a host and leave a VM running, for example.
Posted on Reply
#77
lemonadesoda
wahdangunbut MS always say that oem license was tied with motherboard and they never say SYSTEM, so by the logic you just need ONE license for ONE motherboard despite it have TWO system
Nope. It comes down to the HAL (hardware abstraction layer). Clearly, with a different chipset, processor, BIOS, etc. the HAL is entirely different... identical in software terms to an independent machine.

No way would MS let you use one license on both ends of this.
Posted on Reply
#78
pantherx12
hatWouldn't this be the same thing as running a virtual machine... just not so... virtual?
Not at all.

When your only running the atom part its only 30w used.

so you can leave the atom part running all the time downloading your bits and bobs, and just power up the 775 bit for gaming and video editing etc.

One of these would be awesome for me but way to expensive at the moment, hopefully this sort of thing becomes mainstream.
Posted on Reply
#79
Wile E
Power User
Geofrancisi would like this board to replace my gaming rig and atom server and put it all into one case.

my main problems with this board is i would use the atom cpu for data storage and server dutys and the 775 chip for a main pc.

the main problem with this motherboard is that there is a lack of bandwidth between the 2 computers gigabit is just not enough! a pci-e link would be ideal with 250mb bi directional bandwidth you could setup raid on the atom and use iscsi to connect to it from the 775 machine then you would have a raid array running on an (almost) fully independent storage system that would be imunne to crashes or corruption on the main computer.


they should have put a modern socket and chipset instead of the 775 p45 combination. i5 would be the best combination for this as it only needs 2 chips cpu and southbridge.
Gb is plenty in most cases. Most file transfers over single hard drives don't saturate Gb to begin with. Not until you get into crazy fast storage setups, or multiple, simultaneous access does Gb become a bottleneck.
Posted on Reply
#80
Mussels
Freshwater Moderator
pantherx12Not at all.

When your only running the atom part its only 30w used.

so you can leave the atom part running all the time downloading your bits and bobs, and just power up the 775 bit for gaming and video editing etc.

One of these would be awesome for me but way to expensive at the moment, hopefully this sort of thing becomes mainstream.
i hope so too - its like an advanced version of the laptops where hte video card turns off and runs off a crappy low end intel onboard, to save power.
Posted on Reply
#82
Mussels
Freshwater Moderator
hayder.mastertoo late for LGA 775
i think you made my PC cry.
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