Intel Bay Trail processors are mostly found in tablets, 2-in-1 hybrid laptops, and mini PCs, and they’ve often give placed to Cherry Trail processors, and in some cases Apollo Lake ones. x86 compatibility, low cost and low power are the main selling points of the Bay Trail processor family.
Colorful has found a different use case, as they designed a motherboard with 9 PCIe x16 slots, one for a card powered by an Intel Celeron J1900 processor, and 8 to add graphics card in order to mine cryptocurrencies.
The blue PCI slot takes a PCI CPU card with an the following specifications:
- SoC – Intel BayTrail J1900 quad core processor @ up to 2.42 GHz with 2M Cache, integrated Intel HD graphics; 10W TDP
- Memory – 1×DDR3L SO-DIMM, DDR3L 1333MHz/1066MHz
- Storage – 1x mSATA slot, 1x SATA 3.0 connector, 1x 4-pin SATA connector
- Video Output – HDMI
- Connectivity – Dual Gigabit Ethernet via RTL8111E
- USB – 2x USB 2.0 ports
- PCIe connector to manage graphics cards
- Power Supply – 4-pin header for 12V input
The main motherboard is equipped with 16x 6-pin PCIe power connectors with eight located on one side of the board, and eight placed close to each GPU PCIe slots. To complete the setup connect eight mining graphics cards, and you should be good to go.
Anandtech reports that pricing and availability information is unknown at this stage, and they expect the solution to become available to Colorful customers in the next few months. The product page only has some limited details for now.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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I though that GPU-mining was completely outperformed by dedicated ASICs nowaday (at least for BTC) ?
@ade
probable outperformed, but some guy told me that his 8 gpu setup was still profitable enough 100$ per month now, it was 300$ last year, so …
@ade Ethereum & Co can only be mined on GPUs (yet)
Interesting. So 8 x16 PCIe slots share the bandwidth of PCIe 2.0 x2. But for the use case (wasting energy to generate revenue) it obviously doesn’t matter…
the J1900 Baytrail CPU runs linux badly.. you can only make it stable by disable higher cstates.
I’ve used a j1900 as desktop PC and it runs great with Ubuntu 16.04
I thought the Baytrail cpu state bug was fixed earlier this year.
Asics have made gpu mining impractical for bitcoin, litecoin, dash and a handful of other coins, but most alt coins can still be effectively mined with GPUs. Monero, for example, would be a good use for this motherboard. Also, there will be asics made for Decred soon, which can be installed in PCIe slots, so this board is not limited to GPUs. It could also be used for FPGA acceleration cards. Hopefully the price point on this board is reasonable. What form factor is it? Would this require a rackmount enclosure, or something custom?
Good idea to build a motherboard with pci-e style! So it would be easy to fill all of them into a simple box.
I really dont understand how you could use the 16x power connectors on this motherboard. Most GPU need 6 or 6-8 pins power, why the hell did they put 16 of them onto the motherboard ? The GPU card cant draw more than 60-75 Watts from the bus, so it’s useless….
It looks like it is for ease of use, just plug it in on one side, it depends on how racks are configured. And it would be upgraded easily with very low power ARM SoC and possibly asic boards in future
This is useless, the spacing leaves no room for sufficient cooling of the cards. Put this in a mining room that’s already struggling with temperatures and the cards on this board will be the first to pop.