Tyan's new S2722GNN

[Donald Becker]

On Tue, 12 Nov 2002, Steve Gaudet wrote:

> My concern is the management for this motherboard and if you need this
> Zircon option.  I'm wondering if Tyan is using Zircon for management and not
> putting them into the BIOS.

Zircon is a product name for the most common IPMI BMC (Baseboard
Management Controller).   It's a microprocess that allows network (and,
less interesting, serial line) management of the box independent of the
main CPUs.

This seem to be the most common IPMI BMC.  It's even on the zx6000
Itanium 2 systems.

> Compliance with Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) draft,
> version 1.5 

IPMI 1.5

Observant list readers will not that we've been talking about IPMI
recently.  We will have an IPMI module on our price list after SC2002.

> 12 tachometer inputs for fan speed monitoring

Depending on the chip, you different numbers of general purpose I/O pins
that can be used for LEDs, fan tach, case-open sensors, etc.

> Three I2C master/slave ports

One goes to a 3Com or Intel NIC, the other two to memory devices etc.

> Low pin count (LPC) bus provides access to three keyboard controller style
> (KCS) and one-block transfer interfaces 

The device driver can access this with KCS or MCS interfaces.  Both are
brain damaged, but not quite brain dead.

> 20K-bytes of internal RAM 

The key is what firmware the BMC has.  Using a Zircon chip means nothing
about the protocol or capabilities.  But I'm guessing that there will be
only one or two firmware series.

> Looks interesting.

How much extra?

-- 
Donald Becker				becker at scyld.com
Scyld Computing Corporation		http://www.scyld.com
410 Severn Ave. Suite 210		Scyld Beowulf cluster system
Annapolis MD 21403			410-990-9993