by Grigoriy Gubankov
07/16/2003 | 07:03 AM
Although Opteron series 100 processors, targeted for uni-processor configurations were announced a while ago, there are practically no mainboards to support them on the market, even though nForce3 chipset was announced by NVIDIA quite some time ago and there are some chipsets from VIA, SiS and AMD itself to support 1-way Opteron platforms.
<%BANNER[article]%>The reason of such state of affairs is no completely clear to me, though, there are some points I want to note.
Obviously, there are some difficulties in positioning 1P Opteron systems. On the one hand we receive a rather powerful system, on the other hand, there are 2P Athlon MP systems at the same price-point offering high performance and also strong speed boost in certain applications taking advantage of 2 CPUs. In case we investigate about performance of 2-way Athlon MP systems, we will surely find out that they are kind of faster in vast majority of workstation applications than 1-way AMD Opteron. Performance is definitely a very significant factor in workstation segment and even despite of the fact that micro architecture of AMD Opteron processor is more advanced compared to AMD Athlon MP processor, 2-way Athlon MP is still a better choice for workstations.
However, there is a different situation on the server market. A lot of server applications take more advantage of AMD Opteron architecture rather than from 2 CPUs, hence, there should be some market space for such 1-way systems.
Unfortunately for AMD, NVIDIA, just like VIA and SiS are not treated as developers of highly-reliable chipsets for servers and workstations and that fact will cause customers to consider whether to get an AMD own platform, to get an unknown platform from a new player or simply to get a Xeon-based system. All in all, 1-way AMD Opteron will hardly become popular in workstation segment unless they become very powerful, whereas entry-level server market seems to be a more perspective for such systems in short-term.
TYAN perfectly knows server and workstation market trends and conditions and decided to make its mainboard for one AMD Opteron processor based not on NVIDIA nForce3, but on AMD-8000 series chipset. The mainboard is called Tomcat K8S (S2850) and is obviously targeted not on workstation, but on entry-level server market since it has only AMD-8111 I/O Hub and does not have support for AGP cards. The device carries integrated ATI Rage XL graphics controller, rather typical solution for server mainboards. Other features include 4 memory slots for up to 8 GB of memory (using 2 GB modules), 5 PCI 32-bit 33 MHz slots, dual 10/100/1000Mbit LAN controllers and optional Serial ATA-150 controller with RAID capability.
To sum up, Tomcat K8S (S2850) solution from TYAN is rather attractive choice for building a relatively low-cost entry-level uniprocessor server, for example, file or proxy (or both) server for a workgroup. Probably this is a good news for some system builders, but a 1-way workstation mainboard from TYAN is still under a question mark. Time will tell whether there is one planned or not, I suppose.
Complete specifications of TYAN Tomcat K8S (S2850) mainboard can be found over here. Pricing and availability are to vary and to be announced.