[MinnowBoard] Minnowboard and a standard Nvidia GPU?

[Scott Guthrie]

Certainly.  Any number of them.  Once you hit mini-ITX, you can get real
performance type boards and use desktop i series cpu's with plenty of PCIe
Lanes.  But mini-ITX is significantly larger than a NUC and a LOT larger
than a Max for certain.

But mini-ITX might be a bit big for what you envision.  It's possible
somewhere in the embedded market you might find a small embedded PC with an
Nvidia or AMD Laptop class Video chip integrated.  Perhaps something like
this:

http://www.lannerinc.com/products/all-purpose-box-computers/digital-signage/lec-7900

I dunno if it could be used in the way you want, but there may be something
similar out there.

Scott


On Thu, Jul 16, 2015 at 3:33 AM, Ashot Arshakyan <arshakyanash at mail.ru>
wrote:

> If we're going to think about something the size of a NUC, aren't there
> mini-ITX/ Nano-ITX motherboards suitable for the job then?
>
>
> Среда, 15 июля 2015, 22:01 -04:00 от Scott Guthrie <scottgu3 at gmail.com>:
>
>   You know...this type of thing has been tickling my brain lately.  I
> wasn't thinking Minnowboard though...but a NUC (i7 or i5) would seem to
> have enough oomph to do this.  Sadly they seem to be limited to 12 PCIe
> lanes and 4x1 or 2x4 lane configurations.
>
> And frankly, I can surmise this isn't really in the INTEL roadmap (after
> all a NUC is not really MEANT to be a Gaming PC), but damn, one x16 Slot,
> even if I had to through a slot extender to a second case and power the GPU
> separately.
>
> Once can dream I suppose.
>
> Sorry....Tangent.
>
> S.
>
>
>
> On Wed, Jul 15, 2015 at 8:04 PM, John 'Warthog9' Hawley <
> warthog9 at eaglescrag.net
> <https://e.mail.ru/compose/?mailto=mailto%3awarthog9@eaglescrag.net>>
> wrote:
>
> On 07/15/2015 08:42 AM, Ashot Arshakyan wrote:
> > Hello. I have a project where I need to render thousands of OpenGL
> > frames each second by using a x86 based PC and a typical high end NVidia
> > GPU.
> > The problem is I have a pretty limited space for the electronics of the
> > device I'm working on so I was hoping I could use a single board PC
> > instead of using a mini ATX.
> > SInce the main rendering job is done on the GPU, I thought the
> > Minnowboard CPU would be fast enough for the job. What are your thoughts?
> > Now I just need to know how I can connect a standard GPU to Minnowboard.
> > I'm thinking of powering the GPU with a flat 12V 30A power supply
> > instead of ATX to again save some space.
>
> So there's a couple of things you should be aware of while pondering
> this.  It *MIGHT* work, but you'll need to consider that modern graphics
> cards use a LOT of bandwidth for moving data in and out of the graphics
> card.  They usually employee 16 lanes of PCI-e, which at it's oldest and
> slowest is about 4GByte/s.  So there's two potential issues here:
>         1) The MinnowBoard only has a single lane of PCI-e v2
>            available for use through the high speed expansion
>            header.  This gives you a maximum throughput of
>            about 500MByte/s
>
>         2) *MANY* graphics cards won't negotiate their PCI-e
>            lanes down to the point where it will work in a x1
>            connector.  This is mostly an assumption from the
>            manufacturers that the card would never be used in
>            such a slot.  Case in point when we tried to get a,
>            admittedly rather high end, graphics card working on
>            the MAX on April 1st this year, it didn't work as
>            the card couldn't negotiate down to a single PCI-e
>            lane
>
> The only way to overcome 2, that I can think of, is to put a PCI-e
> switch on the bus that can provide 16 lanes, but only upstream via 1.
> This still limits your maximum bandwidth to 500MByte/s though, but it
> should get you past the lane negotiation issue.  That's a substantial
> amount of work though, and likely a need for a custom lure to be built
> to accommodate it.  Just some thoughts.
>
> - John 'Warthog9' Hawley
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