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Interview with Joe James from Tyan |
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July 8, 1999 |
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by Josh Walrath |
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Update 2007/12/02: I dug this out from the Wayback Machine, as most of my articles from before 2003 were destroyed in a hack attack. Joe is currently with Super Talent and I am expecting a new interview with him shortly. This week I had the pleasure of interviewing Joseph James from Tyan. He is currently the North America Sales Director and has intimate knowledge about the going’s on at Tyan. I thought I would try to pry some juicy information from him about their upcoming products and what type of features we can expect.
PenStar: What is your position at Tyan, how long have you worked there, what do you do? Why did you pick Tyan to work for? Joe: I've been at Tyan for 4 years, and have held various sales and marketing positions: International Sales Manager (Europe and Asia), East Coast Sales Manager, Marketing Director, and now North America Sales Director. The last company I worked for was a motherboard company also (AIR, now owned by Gigabyte). A friend of mine invited me to work here and I came on board because of the Company's engineering strength and growth potential. (In 8/95 Tyan had only 19 people and sold less than $10M/yr).
PenStar: When was the Tyan S1598S released to distributors? When can we expect to see it widely available? What is your manufacturing capacity at Tyan (in boards produced in a week)? Joe: The S1598 was released about 2 weeks ago, but our volumes are still ramping up. It should be readily available in distribution within 1 or 2 weeks. Tyan is a USA based company, founded in 1989 in Silicon Valley. We have 2 manufacturing partners in Taiwan, OSE and Mitac. Mitac and OSE combined have well over 500,000 boards a month production capacity, but Tyan uses only a fraction of that. We are also setting up one SMT line here in our US office so we can build up to 20,000 boards a month in our HQ if we need to, but we will probably use that for time-to-market pilot runs, prototypes and special OEM runs.
PenStar: Were there any complications integrating the MVP3 Northbridge and the MVP4 Southbridge. If so, how did your engineering staff overcome them? Joe: No major design complications with the S1598S combining the 2 chipsets. Fortunately, VIA planned for motherboard companies to do this, but I believe Tyan is the first to have such a product. We're now discussing possibly refreshing the S1590S with the new MVP4 Southbridge to have UDMA66 support.
PenStar: After releasing the Tyan S1590S a year ago, what made you decide that there was a market for the ATX version with upgraded capabilities. Also, why did you wait so long to make an ATX version of the Super 7 motherboard? Joe: I could make up a good company line for this, but the truth is that we kindof misjudged the market. Our first VIA socket 7 board was the S1592S launched in Q1/98. It was an ATX board with the VIA VP3 chipset. We thought ATX would be really popular at that time so we didn't do an AT board. Wrong. The S1592S received a lukewarm response. When the MVP3 came out (PC100) we decided to make an AT board (S1590S launched 8/98) instead to see if it would do better than the ATX. We had mixed expectations, and were really surprised when the board blasted off. We had a conservative production plan so it took us till December to fill all the backorders. I think much of that product's success is thanks to AMD's wildly successful K6-2 and K6-3 CPUs. Then we started to get a lot of customer demand for an ATX super 7. We decided to use the newer MVP4 chipset (dubbed the S1593S), and after a few months of development work we realized it was a dog. We canned that product and went back to the proven MVP3, but kept the newer, improved Southbridge of the MVP4. The graphics performance of the MVP4 just didn't make it, but we knew the UltraDMA66 support was essential. Now it looks like S1598S will be a killer product, just a little later than we would have liked.
PenStar: What can we expect in terms of performance with the addition of the MVP4 Southbridge? What other exciting features does the new Southbridge have? Joe: The new Southbridge has the same PCI performance as the old one, but of course much faster IDE performance with UltraDMA66 support. It adds a low-end soft sound (AC97 audio) controller which doesn't appear to be very popular on our super 7 boards, which tend to be used a lot by gamers with high performance sound cards. We left the sound off the distribution board, but designed it in so we can build it as an OEM option.
PenStar: How long have you been working with VIA, and what were the reasons you decided to break away from Intel in the case of the Socket 7 arena? With the delays and incompatibilities/flaws from the latest Intel Chipsets, has your relationship with Intel changed? Have you become closer to VIA? Joe:
Tyan has been working with VIA for about 2 years. (we used to do a lot
of SiS boards in the old days). We started with VIA when Intel decided
to stop their Socket 7 chipsets with the 430TX. The 430TX was a good
chipset, but didn't have AGP. At that time Socket 7 was about half our
sales. It was very important to us to continue supporting that platform.
We looked at VIA, SiS and ALI and decided VIA was a little ahead of the
other 2 in R&D. We still haven't seen VIA chipsets do very well on Slot
1 motherboards yet. People still prefer Intel. That may change as VIA
begins to support new features like PC133, UDMA66 and later, 4X AGP
which is not supported by 440BX. We're expecting VIA will gain some
ground in Slot 1.
PenStar: How long have you had possession of the MVP4 chipset to test and integrate into motherboards. Why have you not announced a total MVP4 solution? Will there be a MVP4 solution? If not, why? Joe:
As mentioned above, we were disappointed with the graphics performance
of the MVP4 chipset, so we canceled the MVP4 project. We do, however
have a good working MVP4 board ready to ship, the S1593S which we may
still offer to some OEMs if there is interest. Also, most
PenStar: When can we expect a VIA Apollo Pro +133 based motherboard from Tyan? Will there be AGP 4X support with this solution? Are there any advantages/disadvantages with this chipset over the Intel i820 "Camino" platform? Joe: We are developing a VIA Apollo Pro 133 board and it is right around the corner. We're excited about this product. 820 and 840 are still under NDA, so I cannot comment on those chipsets.
PenStar: What are your plans on working with the K7? Do you have any samples of the AMD/ALI/VIA chipset, which do you plan to use? Will you do like other motherboard manufacturers and have a hybrid solution of the AMD Northbridge and the VIA Southbridge? Joe: Our K7 plans are still under wraps. Sorry.
PenStar: What are the advantages of the EV-6 bus over the Intel P6 GTL+ bus? Which is more exciting to work with? Joe: Our K7 plans are still under wraps. Sorry.
PenStar: Are you planning a multiprocessor solution for the K7 such as the famous dual processor series (Thunderbolt) that you produce (the latest of which had all the goodies such as onboard SCSI)? Joe: Our K7 plans are still under wraps. Sorry.
PenStar: What does Tyan have to offer over other companies such as Abit, Asus, FIC, or Aopen? How do you tackle the markets where these guys are dominant? Joe: Our competitive advantages are time-to-market, performance, quality and reliability, features and expandability, better support, documentation, and our 3-year warranty -- all things that stem from our USA based engineering strength. Tyan is also a leader in dual processing.
PenStar: What is Tyan's stance on overclocking? Will future motherboards have the ability to raise the bus speed for improved performance? Why have you stayed with the accepted bus speeds for your past motherboards, and not gone further? Joe: We held out a long time against the overclocking craze due to the potential problems (heat, stability, etc.), but for the last year we've been doing a lot of testing and implementing design changes to enable a wide range of overclocking. We've had BIOS selectable clock speeds on our BX boards for a year now. We still don't recommend it and officially do not support it, which is to say we have disclaimers in our BIOS and in our manual. But most of our boards now have the same overclocking features you'll find on competing boards. Overclocking is far less common in dual processor systems because stability in servers is much more critical than a slight gain in performance.
PenStar: What is the most exciting technology to come down the pipeline for you? What do you think will be most important for users in the future? Joe: More later on new technology and new products.
In Closing: It sure does seem like an exciting time now for Tyan (and probably most motherboard manufacturers). With new products being released at an ever increasing pace, and new and exciting technologies right around the corner, it is nice to see an American company like Tyan keeping up with the pack. Within the next week I am expecting some more comments from Danny Hsu, another fine employee of Tyan, hopefully he can add a few comments and suggestions to this interview, so keep watch for that! I would like to thank Joe for this interview, and all the information that he gave about Tyan’s upcoming products and technology. Good luck Joe!
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Copyright 1999-2007 PenStar Systems, LLC. |
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