Hello,
The time has come to get a big ol’ PC to run QNX on, as finding a fully compatible laptop at the right price is no fun at all. So a few questions:
Athlon 64 - Will this work no problem with QNX? I know it will be 32-bit mode only, and I’m OK with this, but I recall BeOS can struggle to boot on Athlon64, so maybe QNX has similar problems, any experiences?
Serial ATA hard disk - Seems a lot of high end PCs have this as standard now, can QNX boot off them OK?
Video - It seems that ATI Radeon is the way to go, and I read on QNX docs that the All-in-wonder even supports video capture, does this mean you can watch TV using that card under QNX, or just dump to MPEG?
Sound and network I guess just get a couple of $10 cards, and presumably practically 100% of all PC’s USB will work fine?
Athlon 64 works ok (tried with Via chipset) motherboard was MSI.
Serial ATA. I heard report some have it working but I couldn’t get it to work with the MSI motherboard. I didn’t tried hard since it was just a quit test to see if Athlon 64 was working (no one at QSSL I talk to could tell me if it would work or no) . IDE was working with DMA enabled.
I’m using VMware full time so I don’t have to deal with compatiblity issue when it comes to my development machine
Onboard network was a no go, and my video card is radeon based which is supported. I think you are safe that USB works on all motherboard.
Personally I would get the new Intel Pentium Prescott processor with 1mb cache and 800mhz fsb. Costs half, and has way better performance on most 32-bit applications.
Serial ata works, but you need to make sure the controller on the motherboard is just serial ata and not serial ata + RAID wich isn’t supported.
TV capture on the video card lets you dump mpeg and use the TV screen on your pc. You can also connect a vcr and watch movies on your pc, but it doesnt work as TV tuner card. I do not know wether any of this is supported on QNX tho.
On the companion cd there is a variety of sound drivers, so most integrated and pci sound cards should work.
For the network card, any 10 bucks realtek clone should get the job done.
MSI motherboards are good, but ASUS is the best.
Do not get a via chipset with the pentium tho, get intel or SiS.
I hope this helps.
What I did is look over the supported the supported hardware on qnx.com then bought all the upported parts on ebay. Then I had the local computer store assemble it for me.
Seems there is some disagreement over P4 vs. Athlon, but if either is suitable, then my options are pretty open, just a matter of finding a nice one Alienware is so expensive over here in the UK!
One more thing, do any currently available graphics cards have an Alpha-blending (and OpenGL) acceleration under QNX?
Mandrill: Is the companion CD still available for 6.3, when I downloaded 6.3 there was only one ISO offered.
Best bang for the buck is definitely Athlon. As for performance, it depends on the application. But typicaly application compile for P4 get the edge, but since most application under QNX6 are compile for 386 (I beleive), AMD64 is IMHO winning performance wise, in general. In North America AMD does have better ratio cost/performance.
Chris latest Athlon are not as bad as the one you have heatwise
People running high end servers know the thruth about amd
Everyone else is just being influenced by reviews and AMD marketing tactics.
I don’t think the amd64 wich costs over 300 dollars has a better performace in 32-bit apps than a 200 dollars pentium 4. Do you?
Well, the main complaint about the P4’s are due to the fact that they have very slow context switch speeds (and slow branching, etc) due to the deep pipelines. I think we did a test that showed a 1.6Ghz P4 performed about the same as a 800Mhz P3.
Mario - I am sure that is true. My AthlonM’s are bloddy space heaters!
gman - for 3D you would have to aquire a PCI card with a Fugistu Coral-P chipset on it. They are not easy to come buy, but can be aquired. This would give you full hardware accelerated layers (8) with 3D.
cdm, thanks for the info, my 1.8GHz P4 laptop runs QNX very acceptably, but your example of P4 performance is pretty shocking, so I’ll take a look at some Athlon machines.
3D performance is not critical to me at all, and I guess the Coral is more expensive than something like a Radeon 7500. Alpha blending acceleration is more interesting to me as I’ve got some programs using alpha-blending, and the performance is not so hot on my VESA driver using laptop.
Anyway thanks a lot for the info, will buy hardware soon, I’m looking forward to seeing QNX at 1600x1200 with accelerated video!
You bet I do. Actually P4 and AMD64 have the same ratio. Now if you comapre the Xeon to the Opteron, performance wise Opteron wins hands down and is a LOT cheaper.
