Tyan Tempest i5000XL S2692 Preview
Receiving the Tyan Tempest i5000XL, we were once again greeted with Tyan's generic blue box that we have been accustom to seeing for years. As this motherboard was pre-production, we were not welcomed by the usual array of Tyan accessories, but those that go out and purchase the motherboard will have them included. Also at the time, the product manual wasn't fully completed, which is why the product manual was run off on standard sheets of paper -- it was also labeled as a Tiger i5000XL rather than the Tempest series.
Packed onto the SSI CEB server motherboard is a wealth of components. Most notably, the motherboard boasts dual LGA-771 sockets. The LGA-771 design is very close to the LGA-775 desktop socket, but they are not cross compatible. The Tempest i5000XL supports up to two Intel Xeon processors with Dempsey or Woodcrest cores. Both the Dempsey and Woodcrest are dual-cores, and with Hyper Threading and occupying both of the sockets, the total count of logical cores for the motherboard will be eight. The FSB supported are 1333/1066/667MHz. Intel's Xeon 5000 series Dempsey processors are currently for sale, while the Woodcrest components will begin appearing later this month. The currently available Intel Xeon 5000 DP series line-up has some common traits of using a 65nm process, 2MB of L2 cache per core, and their frequencies range from 2.67GHz to 3.73GHz. On the i5000XL, to the left of the CPU sockets are the 4-pin CPU fan connectors, while surrounding both sockets is a wealth of power circuitry.
Powering the motherboard is Intel's 5000X Greencreek + ESB2-V. The 5000X MCH Chipset supports two dual-core Intel 5000 Xeon CPUs, DDR2 FB-DIMM 667/533MHz, and PCI Express x16 graphics. The Chipset supports up to 17GB/s of total system memory bandwidth on a 64GB total capacity. Passive heatsinks cover both of the chips.
The memory supported on the Tyan Tempest i5000XL S2692 are four 240-pin DDR2 FB-DIMM modules. Dual channel memory is also supported; including ECC DIMMs, with the maximum memory supported being 16/8GB of DDR2-533/667. The i5000XL expansion slots include two PCI Express x16 (one using PCI-E x8 signal), one PCI Express x8 (using PCI-E x4 signal), two PCI-X 133/100MHz, and one PCI slot.
Other ASICs on the motherboard include a Winbond 82627EHF Super I/O, SMSC EMC 6W201, Infineon SLB9635TT, Realtek ALC880 audio codec, and Intel 82563EB Gilgal PHY. The power needs for the motherboard are EPS12V / SSI 24-pin + 8-pin power connections.