Follow up on Coppermine "bug".
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Posted 02/12/99 9:31am by Mike Magee
Coppermine bug a marchitectural disaster
Now that the "respectable" news wires have picked up on our story yesterday (you know
who you are) about the bug that means you have to switch your PC on twice, it's worth
taking a longer look at the implications for Intel and for people able to buy Coppermine
processors.
We note that several of these wires have run, verbatim, comments from Intel US PR
spinners claiming that the problem only affects between one to two per cent of
Coppermines going out the door.
But, as we pointed out some months back apropos Q dumping NT for Alpha, one per cent
is 100 per cent for the one per cent affected. Would you get cross if you switched on your
machine and nothing happened?
How many Coppermine processors have shipped so far? You know, the one question that
Intel will never answer is how many of anything it has shipped, and so we don't know
whether this famous "one to two per cent" is between 500,000 and a million, or one, or two.
We rather suspect that it's not 500,000 that are affected, and these are the reasons why.
Currently, Intel is manufacturing .18 micron Coppermines in four fabs, to wit and those are
in Oregon, Arizona, California and Israel. To the best of our knowledge, these are not 100
per cent devoted to churning out the pesky parts.
Intel, when we spoke to the company some weeks back, said that it would continue making
and selling .25 micron processors, although it wants to move its entire fabrication
procedure over to .18 micron by the end of next year.
One Wall Street semiconductor analyst said, off the record yesterday: "I do not think they
have a fundamental manufacturing problem. In my opinion, Intel with Texas Instruments,
Micron and Samsung are the best of the best in semiconductor manufacturing. However,
almost everyone is having a problem in the 0.18 transition compared to 0.25 transition. This
underestimation seems to be the main cause of the problem. I believe intel will sort this
problem out in 1Q00."
Yet even if this soon-to-be-famous "one to two per cent" only represents five to 10
Coppermine chips, Intel has found itself caught on the dangerous fork of perception. Self
evidently, there are not yet enough Coppermines around to satisfy demand, and that has
cost Intel and its PC customers face, as well as making some of its most loyal customers
move to the AMD Athlon competition.
The most famous of Intel's previous erratumnotbugs was the FDIV "flaw" with the Pentium
processor which caused it to massively crank up its keyring production as it was forced to
recall chips and re-imburse customers. At first, it didn't want to do that. Does anyone
seriously think that Dell (and now presumably other major manufacturers), would put a stop
to selling PCs if only one or two machines were affected? We think not.
The launch of Intel Coppermines prematurely on the 25th of October, without proper
motherboard support, can now be seen as a kneejerk reaction, forced on Intel by marketing
issues. The 49 bugs in Coppermine so far reported further demonstrate that Intel, like
Ethelread the Unready, was unready for Verdigrisgate. © |
