Intel Atom C3950 + Tyan Tempest S3227

[coder]

It's still an Atom. Its single-core performance sucks ass, just like the previous gens.

No, it's like you didn't even see the benchmarks. It's not quite as fast as the Xeon Silver (Skylake-SP), which has the same number of threads, but not too far off. If you normalize for clock speed, it might even pull a few more wins.

There is a reason it's still sold for server and industrial usage, and NOT for consumer usage anymore.

More nonsense! They have a whole line of entry-level laptop SoCs that are built around the same Goldmont cores.

https://ark.intel.com/products/codename/80644/Apollo-Lake

It's not the core which makes it unsuitable for consumer use - it's simply the featureset that's targeted towards a different set of applications.

[coder]

That thing totally defies the point though. It does not have ECC and is just a quad?

It's FAR better to get a socketed Pentium/Celeron for that kind of market.

If cost, power, and cooling are of no concern, sure.

Plenty of applications benefit from a decent GPU and don't require tons of compute. I'd agree that they should make a version supporting ECC, but does your home router have ECC? What about HTPC or games console?

[stiiixy]

Sweet little pocket-rocket. Shame about the lack of SATA ports. Obviously not targetting the storage market.

[stiiixy]

Only storage servers and large database servers actually need more than a RAID1, and if the server is part of a large deployment of small units doing the exact same job, or a cluster, you can even go with a single disk (as a failure of a single unit

Theoretically, (and you wouldnt unless built for purpose) you could forego the storage ports altogethor and simply PXE boot your servers. Seen that done on tsunami/tidal detection systems over a decade ago. Security and POS also come to mind.

[GraysonPeddie]

Question: Why does TYAN motherboards not sell in Amazon.com? I know it's not for consumers, but I do find the low-end TYAN motherboards impressive with embedded CPU as low as 9W. This could be very useful for a router setup where minimal power consumption is required since it'll sit idle most of the time running either pfSense or VyOS.

[mbello]

Tyan, why a Realtek NIC on a server board?

[grok]

Theoretically, (and you wouldnt unless built for purpose) you could forego the storage ports altogethor and simply PXE boot your servers. Seen that done on tsunami/tidal detection systems over a decade ago. Security and POS also come to mind.

I don't see what's so theoretical, bunch of servers using a SAN is fairly standard industry practice? You can even have diskless NAS (i.e. front-end nodes, while SAN is storage back end)

On this Atom board you might install a (dual port) Fibre Channel adapter, or more Ethernet on the PCIe 8x slot.

[GraysonPeddie]

Another question: How am I going to connect the display to my motherboard if there are no display ports? I know it's not meant to be used as a general-purpose computer, but I thought I might ask. Can a motherboard really function without a graphics card?

[starshipeleven]

No, it's like you didn't even see the benchmarks. It's not quite as fast as the Xeon Silver (Skylake-SP), which has the same number of threads, but not too far off. If you normalize for clock speed, it might even pull a few more wins.

Did your benchmarks feature single-thread perf? Because that's the main difference (and also what I pointed out in my post above), on multithread they are relatively close, although of course worse.

More nonsense! They have a whole line of entry-level laptop SoCs that are built around the same Goldmont cores.

Ah yes, I forgot about the shitty netbook segment.

It's not the core which makes it unsuitable for consumer use - it's simply the featureset that's targeted towards a different set of applications.

It's the low IPC that fucks them in the consumer market, plain and simple. On a PC you don't usually need more than a dualcore, but singlecore performance is still a strong requirement.

If cost, power, and cooling are of no concern, sure.

Yeah right. The boards aren't going to be designed like shit because it's a budget board and you won't totally end up with a board that burns like 20 watts on idle for no reason, while a socketed Pentium on a decent mini-itx idles at 10 or less watts. Sorry but I have experience in these kinds of things.

Also price isn't much more different, we are talking of 20-30$ of difference at best, and if you buy used or 1-2 gen older you get sweet deals too.

I'd agree that they should make a version supporting ECC, but does your home router have ECC? What about HTPC or games console?

My point was that you are taking a server board and then pulling up a low-end consumer board and try to draw parallels when the two products are very different and target different market segments. So yours is an apple vs bananas comparison.

[starshipeleven]

Another question: How am I going to connect the display to my motherboard if there are no display ports? I know it's not meant to be used as a general-purpose computer, but I thought I might ask. Can a motherboard really function without a graphics card?

Many server boards that lack an IPMI (remote management thingy) can be configured to output UEFI and stuff on a serial port, and on average they don't have silly checks that interrupt boot if they don't detect a GPU.

You only need a GPU for the initial setup, assuming it was not set up to use serial by default.