yes we need special mining motherboard the spec are
- 1. very very cheap
- 2. very low power
- 3. huge number of pcie slot, we don't actually need x16 slots but 8x 1x slots are better
- 4. has onboard low power gpu, just for monitoring without distrupting gpu's for mining
to make it cheap and low power,
remove integrated audio,
remove extensive usb support, just need 2 USB for keyboard and mouse,
remove extensive multiple sata port, just need single sata or MMC slot, we can use low power and cheap cpu such as intel atom
we are currently limited to 8x GPU per motherboard because of driver limitation and windows limitation ( on linux you can recompile the kernel to support more than 8 gpu ), if drivers support more than 8 gpu, we can use PCIe Switch chip such as Pericom P17C9X2G808PR which can split one pcie 1x to 7x pcie 1x
so with 7 slot pcie motherboard we can have up to 42 GPU's per motherboard
https://www.diodes.com/assets/Databriefs/PI7C9X2G808PR-Prod-Brief.pdfmaybe board like this
this board will only need single x16 pcie slot
connected to 16x pcie switch chip Pericom PI7C9X2G404SL, each chip will consume single pcie lane, but can support up to 3 GPU per single lane, so we can have 16x3 = 48 GPU, PI7C9X2G404SL is cheap its only about 10-15$ per chip
so the spec are
- 48 slot x1 pcie through single x16 pcie lane
- 12v dc powered, you can use brick 12v power adaptor like the one is used on laptop
- onboard vga throught vga or hdmi port
- 2x mini pcie for msata-ssd and wifi card (optional)
- one 100mbps RJ45 port
- intel celeron or atom cpu built in
- 2x USB 2.0 port
- 16GB DDR3 SO-DIMM memory]
after mass production board should cost around 80$-100$ per board (including CPU and memory)
anyone interested to support this in kickstarter?
