My Kingdom For A Motherboard
Many years ago, before the economies of the world went to shit, the enthusiast computing market was strong and each new motherboard was continually out-classing the motherboard du jour before it. If the
Asus fuck wagon had 48 lanes of PCIe then the
ASRock fuck mobile had to have 54 lanes which didn't matter because a month later the
Gigabyte fuck train was going to have 58 followed by the
MSI fuck cruiser with an unheard of 64 lanes.
The natural progression was more lanes, faster buses and bigger slots. I expected to see seven
PCIe 16x slots on a single motherboard with full-width buses; none of this bullshit where you had to pick between two 16x slots or three slots at 16x 8x 8x or bullshit like that.
I don't know what the fuck happened but there is currently no motherboard on the market that supports 112 PCIe lanes at any level and I find that unacceptable. There is no
northbridge that supports that many lanes natively and there is no motherboard that has that many lanes accessible.
This thread is about the solution to that. One of the many projects I never finished thanks to my debilitating and untreated schizophrenia is a motherboard the likes of which the world has never seen. I'm trained as an electronics engineer and have decent experience in the design of
PCBs. I've never before tackled many of the problems of motherboard design—such has high frequency
LVDS, high-current
power planes, proximity/latency mitigation and synchronization in component placement and many other minor things like capacitance in the fibers that constitute the PCB adding resistance to the LVDS paths for RAM causing sync issues and memory corruption—but I took on the challenge and have conquered those design considerations.
I'm designing an
AMD socket G34 motherboard with the following basic features:
CPU sockets | 4 |
RAM slots | 48 |
PCIE lanes | 168 |
SATA ports | 6+ |
I'm going off AMD reference designs and will add
GbE NICs,
SATA/
SAS RAID controllers,
USB 3.0 controllers and high quality audio. I have companion projects utilizing
ePCIe that will provide various features that are useful to gamers, server administrators, hackers and power users. I've designed an optional inline encryption system utilizing
jumper configuration matrices that would require knowledge based authentication at the hardware level; this would allow all drives to be encrypted without CPU overhead, be protected by
the fifth amendment and be easily disabled in the event of police raid (simply pulling off the jumpers which could be attached to strings or such would render the entire drive cluster unreadable as encrypted by proven
uncrackable encryption).
The price point of this motherboard would be outrageous and even conservative estimates based on some of the basic parts such as blank PCBs that need to have the traces routed, sockets/slots for CPUs/RAM and the chipset ICs put a most basic model at well over $1,000 for just the parts at the one-at-a-time prices buying each component for just one motherboard. With all the planned additions to the reference designs making one of these from scratch would cost a few thousand if just one was being made.
The reason I've written all this up is that obviously it makes more sense to make bulk orders of the parts and crank out several of these at a time. The motherboard alone would be the single most expensive part of a computer that has no cheap configuration requiring not less then four CPUs and sticks of RAM. There is no case that would support it and it would necessitate an entirely custom mounting solution; shipping would also be outrageous on this motherboard that would range from ten to twenty pounds and be nearly a meter square. Power usage be damned; this would need multiple PSUs or a four-pronged, three-phase power connecter only used in electric clothes dryers.
All of that being said, there would be no computer that begins to approach the level of power a rig built on one of these would have. It would be the last motherboard you ever buy. With a total of sixteen channels of DDR3 RAM for up to 512 GB (registered, ECC), eight PCIe x16 slots at full width (none of that x16 physical but only x8 electrical bullshit) and as many hard drives as your heart desires this motherboard has an unparallelled upgrade path.
I just wish AMD had a northbridge out for the Opteron platform that supported PCIe 3.Regardless, I'm hoping to gauge or drum up interest in this pointlessly power motherboard in hopes of convincing myself to start a
Kickstarter campaign to get these into production. These would jump start the currently dead enthusiast computing market and I honestly just can't afford to make something worth more then my car. I would need to raise about $1,000 each plus the cost of the equipment to make these which would be about $5,000 so those are the numbers I'd use to configure the campaign. Let me know what you think. If you have specific ideas that you'd like to see just put them here and I'll list them in this post.