Intel Developer Forum Spring 2002 - Day 2

Intel's E7500 Chipset Spreads its Wings

The recently announced E7500 chipset was making its first appearance in motherboard designs at the show. This chipset was called the first sexy chipset to come from Intel in quite a while by one of the motherboard vendors and we wholeheartedly agree.

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MSI had their E7500 platform on display however the design was still in engineering sample stages and thus not ready for evaluation. What was interesting however was the fact that MSI seems to be having more problems with the ServerWorks Grand Champion chipset which would mean that the E7500 will hit the market first.

This may only be limited to MSI however as Tyan seems to be further along in their Grand Champion development.

Attempting to prove their worth in the server market, MSI has designed a 2U server platform with their E7500 motherboard as a base. The chassis was relatively well designed although we'd like to see a 1U offering in order to truly be impressed.

Supermicro also had an E7500 board on display, there was no word on shipping timeframe however.

Finally we ran into Tyan whose E7500 platform is beginning mass production and should be available within a matter of weeks. We should have a board to review within the next two weeks to provide a full report on the performance of the E7500 chipset and the Tyan board in general.

Appro, the makers of the 1124 - the 1U AMD 760MP server that also hosts one of AnandTech's Databases - was sharing Tyan's booth with their latest offering based on Tyan's E7500 board. This 1U chassis is virtually identical to their 1124 except it houses dual Xeons paired with Tyan's E7500 board instead of dual Athlons and their Thunder K7. Designing this platform was a bit easier for Appro since the thermal and power requirements of the Xeons are noticeably lower than that of the Athlon MP processors.