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Tyan aims four-way Opteron board at supercomp makers
Boasts Chinese 640-node cluster win
Computex Motherboard maker Tyan today unveiled its first board designed to hold four AMD Opteron 800 series processors - making it the company's highest-performance server chipset, Tyan claimed.
The mobo, the Thunder K8QS Pro, can take up to 32GB of 400MHz ECC DDR SDRAM in its 16 memory slots.
The K8QS Pro's South Bridge functionality is provides by an AMD HyperTransport-to-PCI-X bridge chip and one the chip maker's IO hubs. Into these Tyan has connected a Broadcom dual Gigabit Ethernet controller and either a Silicon Image Serial ATA controller capable of supporting four drives, and providing RAID 0, 1 and 10, or a dual-channel LSI U320 SCSI controller, according to customer choice. Graphics comes courtesy of an 8MB ATI Rage XL chip on the PCI bus.
Tyan is pitching the K8QS Pro at high-performance computing applications rather than the server market. Indeed, it said Chinese supercomputer maker Dawning will use the board to build is TC4000A cluster containing 640 nodes and some 2560 Opteron 8xx chips. When complete, the beast will be able to hack through ten billion floating-point operations each second (10Tflops) - enough to grant it a place in the list of the World's top ten supercomputers, Tyan claimed.
Tyan expects to go into mass production later this quarter, though it is already sampling the part.
It is already offering a four-way board for Intel Xeon CPUs, the Thunder GC-HE Pro. Based on ServerWorks' Grand Champion HE chipset, the Xeon board is limited to a 400MHz FSB, but provides a dual-channel memory bus capable of supporting up to 24GB of DDR SDRAM. It uses the same video controller as the K8QS Pro, but its dual-channel U320 SCSI controller is an Adaptec part, and its two Gigabit Ethernet ports are driven by an Intel controller. ®
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