Hardware Advantech PCA-6740

Advantech PCA-6740

Single-board computer, 2001

A single-board computer built for an equipment cabinet rather than a desk, with its graphics and its network on the board instead of on cards. Babasha's report: everything works.

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os8088 on real hardware

486 board
A green single-board computer lying on a blue book, with grey ribbon cables arched over it to a drive enclosure on the right and a four-wire power lead plugged into its corner. A large ST-branded chip sits near the middle above a row of memory chips, a coin-cell battery and jumpers are at the back, and a module labeled DiskOnChip 2000 sits in a socket beside the gold edge connector. A green LED is lit at the front edge.
The DiskOnChip 2000 is the blue-labeled module beside the edge connector. Photos by Babasha, shared on Discord.

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486 board, close-up
The same board, photographed flat from above on a wooden desk. Four Winbond memory chips run down the left edge beside a large square chip with an ST logo. In the middle, a chip carries PhoenixBIOS and Advantech hologram stickers, with a Winbond W83977AF-A chip and a Toshiba CR2032 coin cell to its right. A socketed chip labeled V1.12 sits above two rows of PC/104 pins, the DiskOnChip 2000 module, marked MD2202-D16, is at the bottom left beside a white four-pin power connector, and a VGA connector, an RJ45 jack and a serial port line the bracket at the right.
486 board, close-up
486 board, REDLINE
A Philips monitor showing the os8088 desktop in black and white at 1024x768. An About box reads os8088 1.0 Build 286. A Task Manager lists System, About, APPS, TaskMgr and REDLINE. An Apps window lists drive A:. In front, REDLINE's Benchmark page reads 275.28x relative to the 4.77 MHz PC, with CPU 387.80x and RAM 50.23x, bars for each job with the graphics jobs marked n/a, and a System Snapshot listing a Cyrix/TI DIV signature processor, VGA, 1024 by 768 and 31744KB of extended memory.
486 board, REDLINE
486 board, Ethernet
The same monitor, with an About box reading Build 291. The Control Panel's Ethernet page lists Card RTL8139, Addr 192.168.1.74, Router 192.168.1.254 and Dhcp Bound, with packet counts of 105 received and 53 sent. The Wire window lists Hello, Minesweeper, Calculator, Note Pad, Paint, PiXEL, Browser, Telnet and WireChat. REDLINE's Inspect page, in blue section bars, reports an IBM AT class machine, an Award 486 BIOS dated 10/01/02, a Cyrix/TI DIV signature processor with an 80387 or later coprocessor, 598KB conventional and 31744KB extended memory, a VESA adapter at 1024 by 768 in 65536 colours, and a boot time of 3.2 seconds from power-on to the first desktop frame.
486 board, Ethernet
CPU
ST STPC Elite, 133MHz
RAM
32MB
video
Silicon Motion LynxEM+, 2MB
Ethernet
Realtek RTL8139C
boot disk
DiskOnChip 2000, 16MB
power-on to desktop
3.2s

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History, photos & source references

Both on-board chips have drivers in the release

And one thing REDLINE cannot measure here.

VESA.DRV runs the desktop at 1024x768 through the Silicon Motion chip's VESA BIOS, and PCIETHER.DRV drives the Realtek controller, which took its address from DHCP. os8088 starts from the DiskOnChip, a flash module in a memory socket that the machine sees as a fixed disk.

The one thing REDLINE cannot do here is time the clock. It knows the processor only as a Cyrix or TI core, from the flags its DIV instruction leaves behind, and that is as close as it can get: the STPC Elite is an ST part built around a 486 core that Cyrix designed and licensed to ST. REDLINE does not measure that family's speed, so the clock in the box is the board's rating, not a measurement.

486 board, close-up
The same board, photographed flat from above on a wooden desk. Four Winbond memory chips run down the left edge beside a large square chip with an ST logo. In the middle, a chip carries PhoenixBIOS and Advantech hologram stickers, with a Winbond W83977AF-A chip and a Toshiba CR2032 coin cell to its right. A socketed chip labeled V1.12 sits above two rows of PC/104 pins, the DiskOnChip 2000 module, marked MD2202-D16, is at the bottom left beside a white four-pin power connector, and a VGA connector, an RJ45 jack and a serial port line the bracket at the right.
The STPC Elite, at left, holds the processor, the memory controller and the PCI and ISA bridges; the board has no separate chipset.
486 board, REDLINE
A Philips monitor showing the os8088 desktop in black and white at 1024x768. An About box reads os8088 1.0 Build 286. A Task Manager lists System, About, APPS, TaskMgr and REDLINE. An Apps window lists drive A:. In front, REDLINE's Benchmark page reads 275.28x relative to the 4.77 MHz PC, with CPU 387.80x and RAM 50.23x, bars for each job with the graphics jobs marked n/a, and a System Snapshot listing a Cyrix/TI DIV signature processor, VGA, 1024 by 768 and 31744KB of extended memory.
The processor jobs score nearly eight times what the memory jobs do.
486 board, Ethernet
The same monitor, with an About box reading Build 291. The Control Panel's Ethernet page lists Card RTL8139, Addr 192.168.1.74, Router 192.168.1.254 and Dhcp Bound, with packet counts of 105 received and 53 sent. The Wire window lists Hello, Minesweeper, Calculator, Note Pad, Paint, PiXEL, Browser, Telnet and WireChat. REDLINE's Inspect page, in blue section bars, reports an IBM AT class machine, an Award 486 BIOS dated 10/01/02, a Cyrix/TI DIV signature processor with an 80387 or later coprocessor, 598KB conventional and 31744KB extended memory, a VESA adapter at 1024 by 768 in 65536 colours, and a boot time of 3.2 seconds from power-on to the first desktop frame.
Eighteen minutes and five builds later: the Control Panel's Ethernet page and REDLINE's Inspect page.

A 1993 Cyrix 486, still in the catalog in 2007

The processor's lineage, and what the board was built to do.

The STPC was not the first PC on a chip (AMD's Elan and National's NS486 were selling before it), but it left less out: the Elan had no FPU, no PCI and no IDE. Microprocessor Report took the first of the family apart in August 1997. The processor is Cyrix's 486DX2 of 1993, redrawn by SGS-Thomson for its 0.35-micron process with the memory bus widened to 64 bits, and ST owned the result outright. ST's simulations put the top speed grade level with a 90MHz Pentium.

The Elite is the member of the family with no display. ST announced it in October 2000 beside the Atlas and the Consumer-II, which both carry graphics; the Elite has sixteen general-purpose I/O lines in their place, at under $26 in lots of 10,000 against under $38 for the Atlas. ST's datasheet offers it for "display-less applications or together with a PCI graphics/video device." Advantech took the second course, with a Silicon Motion chip that carries its video memory inside its own package.

Advantech announced the card for machine controllers such as CNC machines. It has no USB and no audio. A watchdog timer resets it, or raises IRQ 11, when software has not answered for up to 62 seconds. The DiskOnChip socket has a jumper for five addresses from CC000h to DC000h; the BIOS meets the module there in its search for expansion ROMs and runs M-Systems' loader from it, and the loader installs the disk. Advantech's datasheet for the board was last revised in February 2007.

announced
October 2001
form
half-size ISA card, 185 x 122mm
memory socket
SODIMM, to 64MB
expansion
PC/104
power
5V only, 1.62A typical
cooling
no fan

Sources

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