From: Peter Arremann <loony@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Better believe it - cause that's what they are doing :-)
Actually, I can believe it (I just wish that had *1* good option).
Tyan's focus is cost and economies-of-scale.
You'll find the same of SuperMicro, among a few others.
When you start looking at HP and Sun's Opteron designs,
then the mainboard cost is only a portion of the system cost.
So they are more focus on delivering the optimal solution.
Because doing so only affects the end price less than 10%,
whereas it might affect the mainboard cost 50%+.
> Tyan doesn't lay out that many different boards from scratch...
> just look at most of their stuff (S2892, S2885, S2882) - the
> CPU/memory area is identical, so all they did was take the old
> design, mod around with the chipset and PCI/PCI-X/PCI Express
> slots and they got a new one...
Actually, other than EMF and the support microelectronics, it's
simply a matter of deciding how many traces you want, which
may result in more PCB layers.
Tyan is really focused on cost.
They have an older, "cheap" 2-way Opteron mainboard that
doesn't even put DDR channels on CPU #2.
And several manufacturers are even worse than Tyan.
Especially the non-server focused vendors.
SuperMicro and Tyan are better than most.
But still not the quality in mainboard design you'll get
from select Tier-1 OEMs like HP and Sun.
--
Bryan J. Smith mailto:b.j.smith@xxxxxxxx
