X-bit labs

X-bit labs CeBIT 2005 Coverage: Day 7 (page 6)

Category: Editorial

by Anton Shilov

[ 03/24/2005 | 04:56 PM ]

8-Way AMD Opteron Server is Here from TYAN

Advanced Micro Devices powers a lot of enterprise servers these days, but the majority of AMD64 servers on the market are 2-way systems, whereas 4-way and 8-way systems are hardly popular. Especially 8-way machines which have been offered only by IWILL for about 9 months now, but with no tangible success, it seems. Even though it’s a long time before 8P AMD64 machines will gain acceptance among enterprises, TYAN was at CeBIT 2005 to demonstrate its own 8-way AMD Opteron system.

  
TYAN’s 8-Way AMD Opteron Server and its specifications

TYAN’s Transport VX50 (B4881) is based on NVIDIA nForce Pro core-logic that sports 1000MHz HyperTransport bus along with PCI Express interconnection. The system contains 2 mainboards for 4 CPUs that are interconnected with special HyperTransport connectors. One of the mainboards is primary, with slots for add-in cards and numerous additional controllers, another is secondary, which has only CPU sockets and DIMM slots.

  
TYAN Thunder K8QW, the primary mainboard

The secondary mainboard

TYAN’s 8P AMD64 system can be equipped with 128GB of registered DDR SDRAM, 2 Gigabit Ethernet ports, 3 PCI-X 64-bit 133MHz slots, 1 PCI  Express x16 slot, 1 PCI Express x4 slot and 5 PCI expansion slots. The system can support up to 16 hot-swappable Serial ATA and SCSI hard disk drives.

HyperTransport interconnection between the mainboards

The system was exhibited, but was not working at CeBIT 2005.

Actual pricing and availability timeframe of 8-way AMD Opteron-based server from TYAN are unclear.