DELL HALTING CUMINE SHIPMENTS!! -- anonymous story on JC's.
jc-news.com
99/11/30, 1:05pm - Oh, dear. This sounds kind of serious. The fellow sending me this is, of course, anonymous (anonymousity seems very popular these days, methinks), but I am going to quote verbatim (since the quote was notched by the emailer, anyway. This is from a company called Dell, I'm sure a couple of you have heard of it. ;)
"We are in the process of executing a Stop Ship for Coppermine Processors in OptiPlex worldwide ... There is very little info on this yet except that failure mode appears between power-up, power-down cycles as an intermittent lock-up. Intel began screening all CuMine inventory on Monday (11/22), but we do not have an indication yet of what marking and/or lot codes identify 'screened' lots. Futhermore, some initial testing within Dell suggests the screen described by Intel would not 100% catch failures..."
I do not have absolute verification of the source's identity, and it would kind of be a breach of journalistic protocol and stuff to try to hunt them out. You'll have to make the call yourself on this one, though I have to say my gut say "uh-oh" when confronted with this possibly catastrophic news. I should note that other tests of the Coppermine have not exhibited the same problem reported here. If the story is true, it may well manifest itself with or be caused by the type of motherboards or RIMMs that Dell is using. So it might not be a Coppermine-specific problem.
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