<div dir="ltr"><div>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.<br><br></div><div>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:<br><br><a href="http://www.lannerinc.com/products/all-purpose-box-computers/digital-signage/lec-7900">http://www.lannerinc.com/products/all-purpose-box-computers/digital-signage/lec-7900</a><br><br></div><div>I dunno if it could be used in the way you want, but there may be something similar out there.<br><br></div><div>Scott<br></div><div><br></div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Thu, Jul 16, 2015 at 3:33 AM, Ashot Arshakyan <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:arshakyanash@mail.ru" target="_blank">arshakyanash@mail.ru</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div>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?<br><br><br><blockquote style="border-left:1px solid #0857a6;margin:10px;padding:0 0 0 10px">
Среда, 15 июля 2015, 22:01 -04:00 от Scott Guthrie <<a href="mailto:scottgu3@gmail.com" target="_blank">scottgu3@gmail.com</a>>:<br>
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<div><span class=""><div dir="ltr"><div><div><div><div>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.<br><br></div>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. <br><br></div>Once can dream I suppose.<br><br></div>Sorry....Tangent.<br><br></div>S.<br><div><div><br><br></div></div></div></span><div><br><div><div><div class="h5">On Wed, Jul 15, 2015 at 8:04 PM, John 'Warthog9' Hawley <span dir="ltr"><<a href="https://e.mail.ru/compose/?mailto=mailto%3awarthog9@eaglescrag.net" target="_blank">warthog9@eaglescrag.net</a>></span> wrote:<br></div></div><blockquote style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div><div class="h5"><div><div>On 07/15/2015 08:42 AM, Ashot Arshakyan wrote:<br>
> Hello. I have a project where I need to render thousands of OpenGL<br>
> frames each second by using a x86 based PC and a typical high end NVidia<br>
> GPU.<br>
> The problem is I have a pretty limited space for the electronics of the<br>
> device I'm working on so I was hoping I could use a single board PC<br>
> instead of using a mini ATX.<br>
> SInce the main rendering job is done on the GPU, I thought the<br>
> Minnowboard CPU would be fast enough for the job. What are your thoughts?<br>
> Now I just need to know how I can connect a standard GPU to Minnowboard.<br>
> I'm thinking of powering the GPU with a flat 12V 30A power supply<br>
> instead of ATX to again save some space.<br>
<br>
</div></div>So there's a couple of things you should be aware of while pondering<br>
this. It *MIGHT* work, but you'll need to consider that modern graphics<br>
cards use a LOT of bandwidth for moving data in and out of the graphics<br>
card. They usually employee 16 lanes of PCI-e, which at it's oldest and<br>
slowest is about 4GByte/s. So there's two potential issues here:<br>
1) The MinnowBoard only has a single lane of PCI-e v2<br>
available for use through the high speed expansion<br>
header. This gives you a maximum throughput of<br>
about 500MByte/s<br>
<br>
2) *MANY* graphics cards won't negotiate their PCI-e<br>
lanes down to the point where it will work in a x1<br>
connector. This is mostly an assumption from the<br>
manufacturers that the card would never be used in<br>
such a slot. Case in point when we tried to get a,<br>
admittedly rather high end, graphics card working on<br>
the MAX on April 1st this year, it didn't work as<br>
the card couldn't negotiate down to a single PCI-e<br>
lane<br>
<br>
The only way to overcome 2, that I can think of, is to put a PCI-e<br>
switch on the bus that can provide 16 lanes, but only upstream via 1.<br>
This still limits your maximum bandwidth to 500MByte/s though, but it<br>
should get you past the lane negotiation issue. That's a substantial<br>
amount of work though, and likely a need for a custom lure to be built<br>
to accommodate it. Just some thoughts.<br>
</div></div><span><font color="#888888"><div><div class="h5"><br>
- John 'Warthog9' Hawley<br>
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