Tyan s8026 Single Socket AMD EPYC Server Motherboard
Tyan's Tomcat SX S8026 is an NVMe focused single socket AMD EPYC (Formerly codenamed Naples) motherboard in an EATX form factor. Harnessing the power of a single AMD SP3 socket, the board is designed to deliver 2P performance within a 1P footprint. The motherboard is designed for traditional 2P workloads such as fast cloud storage, real time analytics, big data, e-commerce, and video streaming applications. It features support for high speed NVMe deployment with 64 PCIe lanes available near the front of the motherboard over eight PCIe x8 SFF-8611 Oculink connectors. By adopting an industry standard EATX form factor, the s8026 allows customers to deploy it with minimal integration efforts into existing chassis designs.

Key Features

AMD EPYC 14nm CPU
The AMD EPYC processor offers the highest possible performance from a single CPU socket, including:

• Up to 32 CPU cores and 64 threads
• Support for up to 2TB total RAM per socket on all CPU models
• 128 PCIe lanes

Dual Socket Feature Set
Traditionally, the only way to deploy a large number of PCIe devices has been to select a dual-socket motherboard even if the compute demands of the server was low. Tyan has targeted these applications with the AMD EPYC platform by supporting up to 124 PCIe lanes and 8 memory channels in a single-socket platform. Significant savings can be had both in CPU cost and power consumption by migrating workloads to a single socket AMD EPYC platform.

124 PCIe Lanes
The s8026 motherboard was designed from the ground up to take full advantage of AMD's Single-Socket I/O capabilities. The board exposes 124 PCIe lanes across a variety of connectors:

• (8) PCIe x8 SFF-8611 Oculink connectors for NVMe
• PCIe Gen 3.0 x24 Riser Card Slot
• PCIe Gen 3.0 x16 Riser Card Slot
• PCIe Gen 3.0 x16 OCP LAN Mezzanine
• PCIe Gen 3.0 x2 NVMe M.2 ports for OS drives

16 NVMe Ports
NVMe technology offers breakthrough performance for SSDs by attaching storage devices directly to the PCIe bus, freeing them from the SATA protocol that was originally designed for slower rotational media. This technology significantly reduces storage latency and increases transfer speeds.

To put things into perspective, during the summer of 2017 the fastest SATA SSDs on the market were already saturating the SATA 6G bus with peak sequential transfer rates of 550MB/s read and 520 MB/s write. The bigger pipe and lower latency of the NVMe PCIe x4 link allows the fastest NVMe SSDs to reach sequential read rates of 3,500MB/s and read rates around 2,100MB/s. Non-sequential performance heavily favors NVMe devices as well, with typical SATA SSDs achieving 4K random read/write performance around the 100K IOPS mark. In comparison, performance NVMe devices routinely offer 4K random R/W numbers in the neighborhood of 350-450K+ IOPS.

Previous motherboard designs were not well suited to NVMe deployment due to a lack of PCIe lanes. Each NVMe device requires a PCIe x4 link. Large numbers of these devices could not previously be deployed without expensive and bottleneck inducing switch chips or without quickly running out of I/O resources for other devices in the server. The AMD EPYC CPU is ideal for this storage technology, featuring support for 128 PCIe lanes from a single CPU socket.