[Arm-netbook] EOMA server standard

[luke.leighton]

On Thu, Oct 25, 2012 at 10:03 PM, peter green <plugwash at p10link.net> wrote:

> [lots of useful technical stuff snipped]

> Personally I think it may be too early to design a backplane standard
> for arm servers and we may need to wait and see whether the bulk of the
> market follows the marvell approach or the calexeda one. If you had to
> choose one i'd probablly be inclined to go with the marvell one as at
> least it can fairly easilly support non server-specific SoCs.
>> for the pin-outs i figured that at least one 10GBase-T interface (8
>> pins plus 8 GND spacers) would be acceptable,
> Using 10GBASE-T to communicate with backplanes is crazy since it's power
> hungry as hell even using 1000BASE-T is still pretty crazy. Remember the
> SoCs don't support BASE-T directly they need seperate transceiver chips.

 yes.  that's where i was hoping to put the standard: somewhere which
is pretty obviously just a matter of plugging servers into standard
switches, basically.

i.e. imagine that the backplane standard's prototype could be
constructed from off-the-shelf switches, off-the-shelf cables and
off-the-shelf hard drives, what hardware would you pick?  those are
the lines along which i'm thinking, perhaps naively, i don't know.

ah i've got an idea.  if the cards are stacked on top of each other,
you could have a 2-height one have 2 connectors.  or a 3-height one
have 3 connectors.  that way, if you wanted one particularly thick
card to have 2 lots of ethernets, you'd make it cover 2 slots.

achh :)

l.