Radius Rocket Daughterboards

[Nathan_A]

Are you talking about additional ways to enhance the Rocket or something else? The Rockets all have 128k of L2 cache for their onboard CPU... I think?

 

[jeremywork]

Are you talking about additional ways to enhance the Rocket or something else? The Rockets all have 128k of L2 cache for their onboard CPU... I think?

Sorry, we're diving off on a tangent.

I think the Rockets do have 128k L2.

The proposal was to transmogrify the Rocket SCSI II board to fit in regular 040 sockets for host Macs. I proposed combining the Daystar slot-free adapter and the Sixty Eight Thousand RAID Warrior as an alternate path to realizing such a device, while perhaps adding a cached Quaddoubler equivalent in-line.

 

[Nathan_A]

I'm only guessing that these little add-on boards are 040 PDS cards, FWIW. For all I know those custom Radius ICs could be providing some kind of bespoke I/O subsystem.

 

[jeremywork]

I'm only guessing that these little add-on boards are 040 PDS cards, FWIW. For all I know those custom Radius ICs could be providing some kind of bespoke I/O subsystem.

I’d guess you’re right. The RAID Warrior and SCSI bolt are verifiably PDS cards.

 

[ppuskari]

I know this is from a bit ago, but I did want to chime in that I do own 2 of the PCI adaptor boards for the Stage II rockets. I got them both from an ex-Radius engineer several years ago He said they came out of the Radius fileserver pre-press machine that used 12 Rockets stage II in it. I can never remember the name of that project. But these were usually used for the Fiber networking cards he said. I have two of the base PCI addons, bu but only 1 of the PCI slot attachment angle part. The pictures posted above are exactly what I have but minus the fiber card attached to it.
UPDATE: I remembered what it was called. Skylab was the prototype project for a 14 Stage II Rocket system which Radius was rumored to have made 3 machines. My PCI addons came out of one of them I was told at the time. I really wish I still had the emails etc from the guy on ebay I bought them from. I was going to to bring my setup to VCFSW this year but ran out of time. I have a Mac II with a Daystar Turbo 040 on the main board setup, but then have 4 radius rockets stage II and a YARC NuSprint card installed to run Infini-D multinode rendering. when they are all cranking away it pulls 450 watts from the wall... 200 over what the PS is rated for. oops.

 

[Phipli]

I know this is from a bit ago, but I did want to chime in that I do own 2 of the PCI adaptor boards for the Stage II rockets. I got them both from an ex-Radius engineer several years ago He said they came out of the Radius fileserver pre-press machine that used 12 Rockets stage II in it. I can never remember the name of that project. But these were usually used for the Fiber networking cards he said. I have two of the base PCI addons, bu but only 1 of the PCI slot attachment angle part. The pictures posted above are exactly what I have but minus the fiber card attached to it.
UPDATE: I remembered what it was called. Skylab was the prototype project for a 14 Stage II Rocket system which Radius was rumored to have made 3 machines. My PCI addons came out of one of them I was told at the time. I really wish I still had the emails etc from the guy on ebay I bought them from. I was going to to bring my setup to VCFSW this year but ran out of time. I have a Mac II with a Daystar Turbo 040 on the main board setup, but then have 4 radius rockets stage II and a YARC NuSprint card installed to run Infini-D multinode rendering. when they are all cranking away it pulls 450 watts from the wall... 200 over what the PS is rated for. oops.

I didn't realise you had the PCI daughter card, or if I did, I'd forgotten.

If you want we could work out an uprated PSU for you sometime? It wouldn't be the worst these days - you'd find a server ATX that was long and thin and fit the enclosure

It would probably be an idea to up-rate case cooling too.

 

[joshc]

I have a Mac II with a Daystar Turbo 040 on the main board setup, but then have 4 radius rockets stage II and a YARC NuSprint card installed to run Infini-D multinode rendering.

Wow. Got any pics or videos of this setup? This is awesome!