Ronald G Minnich wrote:
> On Thu, 14 Jun 2001, Bob Drzyzgula wrote:
>
>
>>Don't most modern chipsets also support I2C? I would
>>imagine that this would be a decent interface to use
>>instead of a traditional serial port. If necessary,
>>one could probably place a UART on the I2C bus. [? I
>>briefly tried to find a stock I2C UART but came up empty;
>>I suppose that it would be reasonably straightforward to
>>build one out of something like a Philips 87LPC762, which
>>incorporate I2C and UART hardware together with 8051 logic
>>to mediate between them, and cost around $1 to $2 each.]
>>
>
>>From what I've seen I2C is a coming thing in "off board" management.
I2C/SMBus is still on the new chipsets for system management and will
remain until they change and pull the eeproms off the memory DIMMs. Some
of the embedded chipsets and SOCs like Geode don't have a standard SMBus
interface so you just use two GPIO pins and some software to create one.
It's also a nice standard way to be able to power up and down nodes over
the network (not just boot) as well as monitor node/cpu temperatures,
supply voltages and the type of RAM installed since new ethernet
controllers have wake-on-lan along with a SMBus interface.
Bari
