Appro International, the other company besides Newisys known to be putting Opteron systems together, is going to turn up at the great Opteron launch in New York on Tuesday with three 2p 1Us, two 2p 2Us and what purports to be the first known Opteron blade, a dual-processor board.

It says its newfangled homegrown HyperBlade design stuffs 80 blades, 160 processors in a rack, though whether the design is really and truly a blade design and not just a bunch of 1U boards shoved in a rack is a question. Blades are new to the company. It's got a likeminded similarly dense Xeon-based HyperBlade it also intends to start selling next month.

Appro is using three different Opteron motherboards in its 1Us and 2Us. It planned to use a fourth but now says it was told that the Tyan mobo it was expecting won't be available until June. Which evidently means that Tyan isn't going to make the launch party, according to what Appro's marketing director Maria McLaughlin says, vaguely alluding to the notion that the Tyan board isn't finished. However, said board has reportedly been shown running systems so its sudden unavailability is a little mysterious.

And Tyan may not be the only no-show. According to the scuttlebutt on the AMDzone Web site, "Solectron is rumored to have pulled their product launch due to pressure from another technology sector giant. Supposedly their four-way mainboard was ready to support a 1U rack solution." My. My. Shades of jackboots and riding crops.

Selectron, probably the heaviest player AMD had, was also supposed to be good for a two-way, by the way.

Other news sites that, unlike us, regularly follow the comings and goings of mobo makers report that their field glasses are trained on Supermicro to see if it'll be a player too since it's got a server bent and is evidently tight with Intel just like Solectron.

That being said, Appro is currently using two Taiwanese boards: one from MSI, aka MicroStar, and another more expensive one, McLaughlin says, from Arima. It's also using the Newisys design from AMD?s main Opteron partner.

The other confirmed motherboard maker that AMD has rounded up for the occasion is supposed to be Gigabyte. All five, Selectron, Tyan, Arima, MSI and Gigabyte, are server players.

Anyway, Newisys is the basis of the Appro S120, which McLaughlin says, using ballpark numbers, will sell for $4,000-$6,000. Newisys has previously envisioned the thing going for $2,500-$5,000, the same as existing two-way 1Us built with 32-bit Intel chips.

Appro's two other Opteron 1Us, the 1100 and 1122, will be priced around $2,900, McLaughlin said. The difference between them is supposed to be that one has removable drives, or will have, the other doesn't. The 2Us, the 2124 and 2128, will go for around $3,500. The 2124 can apparently support four drives, the 2128 eight. According to what McLaughlin said, the customer gets to pick the mobo, MSI or Arima, used in any of these.

Appro's Opteron HyperBlade, a cluster solution aimed at the HPC market, will cost between $160,000 and $320,000, depending on configuration. Immediately it will run a 32-bit version of Red Hat Linux, with a 64-bit version to come, Appro said. The company describes the thing as allowing people to add capacity, reconfigure on-the-fly and use real estate economically. It'll support a maximum 14.4TB of local storage as well as Myrinet, Quadrics and Infiniband and can be remotely managed with Appro's own BladeDome software.

Appro sells direct and through channels. It says it's been supplying Opteron evaluation units and is now taking pre-orders.

Meanwhile, kinda late Thursday Cnet came up with some unconfirmed pricing for the three Opteron chips that's different from the prices we gave a month ago when our sources reported that AMD had finally put price tags on the parts. Cnet says the 1.4GHz 240 chip will cost around $340 in volume, and the increasing rare 1.6GHz 242 and 1.8GHz 244 will be around $800 and $900.

We had gotten something like $225, $450 and $600-$650 respectively from people who said the things were supposed to be at parity with comparable Xeon DP chips.

The Cnet pricing would put the 240 against the $455 2.8GHz Xeon rather than the $284 2.6GHz Xeon and put the 242 and 244 out of the Xeon DP class altogether, but less than the Xeon MP, which starts at over a grand. Cnet, which acknowledged that pricing above Intel was out of character for AMD, seemed to attribute the differences to Opteron's 1MB cache.

Cnet said that its sources cautioned that prices could change and that "historically wide discrepancies have existed between AMD's posted prices and the actual prices that the chips sell for."

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