> A far more stable approach to increasing computing power is using the > motherboard as simply a backplane bus, with a slow stable CPU simply > managing the bus. Most new add-on cards are ready for this re-invented s > ystem design (a throwback to the mainframe). Video cards, sound cards, > controller cards, etc. all have their own Bios and CPU and command > interface and system memory access. the Big Concept I had for computer architecture bears some resemblance to this; but I don't know enough about the Electrical Engineering details to know what's possible, and what isn't. as I understand SGI's O2 architechture; there's a memory manager which controls access to main memory; and other devices just sort of hang off it -- CPU, Graphics Processing Unit, display processor, I/O boards, etc. the GPU shares memory space with the CPU; so there's no "out to memory, over the bridge, into graphics memory, into the GPU" chain; it's just "put something in memory and tell the GPU where it is". if this could be sufficiently generalized (and I think HyperConnect [?] and a few other new technologies are headed in this direction); you just have a memory controller, and 'channels' hung off it. want more number-crunching speed? put another CPU on a channel. want better graphics performance? put more GPUs on; and since they all share the same memory space, it should be easy to Scan Line Interleave like the old Voodoo cards -- but may be possible between completely different cards, instead of just cards built for it. to a degree, SGI's Origin 3000 architecture is like this... too bad it's out of the price range of ordinary mortals. I hope this sort of idea works down the price scale tho; it's just too cool to let it go the way of the VAXCluster and NeXT... Carl Soderstrom -- Network Engineer Real-Time Enterprises (952) 943-8700