Tyan unleashes 16-core 'personal'
supercomputer
By Tony Smith in Taipei
7th June 2006 08:54 GMT
Computex 2006 Taiwan's Tyan today pledged to ship a deskside
"personal supercomputer" powered by eight Intel low-voltage
'Woodcrest' Xeon processors and packing up to 48GB
of memory in the fourth quarter. But expect to pay at
least $10,000 for the wheel-mounted machine, the company
said.
Named Typhoon - it'll "blow you away", quipped Tyan CEO Symon
Change - the 68 x 36 x 32cm system contains four removable
motherboard units, each with a pair of dual-core Xeon 5100-series
LV CPUs and 12GB of registered 533MHz or 667MHz DDR 2 SDRAM. Each
'node' board can take a single SATA storage devices.
The four nodes run co-operatively using Windows or Linux clustering
software to deliver "respectable" performance for scientific apps,
Chang said. And for business and productivity tools too, it added -
the company wants to broaden the machine's appeal beyond boffins
and engineers.
The Woodcrest-based Typhoon, the B5372, will be preceded by the
B5191, this time based on four 'Conroe' Core 2 Duo CPUs but capable
of taking up to 64GB of unbuffered 667MHz DDR 2 connected via an
Intel 3000 North Bridge - the B5372 uses the 'Blackford VS'
chipset. The Conroe machine is aimed at "cost-conscious" buyers,
Tyan said, the other at the more performance hungry.
Both models have eight USB and eight Gigabit Ethernet ports. They
ship with an XGI Volari Z7 (XG20) GPU with 16MB of dedicated
graphics memory. Each box consumes just under 1,400W in total -
each node has its own PSU and requires its own power cable. If the
power draw is high, the noise isn't: Typhoon generates under 45dB,
Tyan said.
Tyan said Typhoon would going into mass production later this year:
August for the B5191, with the B5372 coming in October. Tyan said
prices will start at around $10,000 - plenty for a personal
computer, but rather less than comparable supercomputing cluster
set-ups cost, the company claimed. ®
Got roller leh...can bring to anywhere you want. 
Then can use this to play lan games.... 
think about this 16PCs (cores), so that beats buying 16 individual
PCs individually...i mean the price. 