Tyan has lost its fear of Intel

By offering five Opteron motherboards, Tyan currently has the best up to two-way line-up available. This would indicate that Tyan is serious about cleaning up a large part of the Opteron systemboard business.

When one looks at what the other Opteron board makers are offering, they all fall far short of the current market leader. This should not be a surprise, as Tyan is already considered the premier supplier of Athlon MP motherboards. Let's run through the highlights of Tyan's motherboard line-up.

The five model line-up
The entry-level Tomcat K8S ( S2850) is a pure single processor server board. The ATX systemboard comes with dual gigabit Ethernet, USB, and ATI onboard graphics. Its four DIMM slots support up to 8 GB of DDR memory. Tyan also offers this board with SATA RAID as an option. Since the board doesn't support an AGP slot, six PCI slots populate the board.

Tyan's Tiger K8W ( 2875) is an ATX workstation motherboard that supports up to two AMD Opteron processors. Its four DIMM slots support up to 8 GB of DDR memory. AGP 8X/4X support, 5 PCI slots, SATA RAID, FireWire, USB 2, and Gbit LAN complete the features line-up.

For those that don't need the dual processing horsepower of the Tiger K8W, Tyan offers the same board with single processor support.

The Thunder K8S ( S2880) was Tyan's first Opteron motherboard. This extended ATX server board supports up to two Opteron processors. With 6 DIMM slots, up to 12 GB of DDR memory can be supported. Four 64-bit PCI-X slots endow this board with heavy weight server credentials. A single PCI slot takes care of legacy devices. Dual channel Gbit LAN ports, onboard ATI graphics, USB, and SATA RAID completes the standard spec. For those that need U320 SCSI, Tyan has this board available with that option.

Tyan has recently introduced a Pro version of its Thunder K8S ( S2882) board. This adds two additional DIMM slots that extends memory support to 16 GB of RAM. It also adds Intel 10/100 Ethernet support to the Broadcom 2x Gbit LAN. U320 SCSI is available as an option with zero-channel RAID.

Tyan's top workstation motherboard is the Thunder K8W ( S2885). This dual processor board has all the bells and whistles: AGP 8X/AGP Pro 110 graphics support, four 64-bit PCI-X slots, one PCI legacy slot, USB, Gbit LAN, FireWire, SATA RAID, and 8 DIMM slots for up to 16 GB of DDR memory.

Tyan's Opteron motherboards support the AMD-8000 chipset. Those with PCI-X hang the Gbit LAN off those high-speed interfaces.

Tyan's Opteron motherboards should all be in volume production. So if you want to buy an Opteron board from a company that doesn't compromise its ethics by taking the Intel shilling , Tyan currently has the best up to two-way line-up available.

From October 14th to December 4th, Tyan will be holding its North American Roadshow, where Tyan will be displaying its latest Intel and AMD board offerings. Venue details can be found here.

If you've been looking for a Linux driver for your Tyan motherboard, the board maker now has a Linux driver page.

Tyan is no longer backward coming forward with
its Opteron motherboard offerings
I wrote some months ago about the pressure that Tyan was under when it had to position its Opteron motherboards against Intel-based solutions. Tyan doesn't seem to have that problem any longer.

Giant conglomerate Mitac is Tyan's major shareholder. It is interesting to note that this company will be one of the first to debut an Athlon 64 mobile solution in Germany. It would appear that both Mitac and Tyan have no fears about maximizing their AMD64 opportunities.

Kudos to both these companies. | As long as they still love each other, Ed. |

Let's hope that other companies will now have less fear about launching their AMD64 solutions.

See Also
Intel girls on Computex stands were part of huge marketing push
Lovely Athlon 64 Acer notebook "postponed" for a long time
Where are the Opteron workstation motherboards?
Is Tyan hamstrung by Intel pressure?
Another Opteron motherboard is stealthily launched
Tyan puts its house in order