Computex: Tyan’s Typhoon Offers Big Power in a Small Box

Billed as a “personal supercomputer,” Tyan Computer’s upcoming Typhoon server aims to bring greater computing power to small work groups.

Tyan will offer two variants of the Typhoon server, one based on Intel’s upcoming Woodcrest Xeon chip and another on its next desktop chip, called Conroe. Woodcrest and Conroe are both dual-core chips that will offer significant increases in performance over existing Intel chips while consuming substantially less power.

Woodcrest is particularly important for Intel, which hopes the chip will help regain ground lost to rival Advanced Micro Devices’ Opteron processor.

Although the Typhoon is housed in a single, small box, each system functions as a cluster with the ability to put several of the systems together into a larger cluster. The Typhoon PSC B5372 can hold up to eight Woodcrest chips and 64GB of RAM on four motherboards. The B5191 houses four Conroe chips on four motherboards with up to 32GB of RAM. Both systems also include Gigabit Ethernet ports.

Typhoon is designed for work groups that demand access to very powerful computers for applications such as research and simulations. The servers can run either Microsoft’s Windows operating system or Linux.

Typhoon will begin to appear in sample quantities during the third quarter of this year, with volume production scheduled for the fourth quarter, Tyan said. Pricing will start at US$10,000.

Computex runs through June 10.

-Sumner Lemon, IDG News Service

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