Hi blake paterson; The Thunderbird mobo problem isn't that big of a problem cause most people buy a new motherboard when they upgrade their machines.
The Camino problem was a total halt of production, not the same kind of beast at all. And six months later, we still aren't sure what really caused it.
AMD caught the problem early, this is the normal kind of kinks that show up in most design work. By contrast, the Camino boards were way late, and the final bug ended up putting off the whole thing. Dell advertised product that they couldn't produce. Micron made fun of it cause they had gone with PC133. Memory makers halted production of RDRAM. Do you really want to compare this sort of problem with a motherboard spec change, that was released well before full production of the chip and motherboard?
Those Camino boards were pretty useless without the Camino chipset, but Athlon motherboards work fine with Athlon chips. No scrap cost. Some redesign cost, and a new rev of the motherboards for Thunderbird compatibility. Big deal.
None of the industry really cares much how well they support the upgrade market. Note that recent i840 boards were unable to support 1GHz Pentiums. Did you see guys crowing about that all over the Intel boards? No, cause no one cares.
AMD is doing fine. It would be nice to be able to have no change to the motherboards to support the new chips, but the fact is that the old motherboards were never speced to take anything other than Athlon chips. It would be nice to have had them work with Thunderbird, but it's just not that big of a deal.
Personally, I'm waiting for the DDR motherboards later this year. The only reason I would replace an Athlon with a Thunderbird was if my previous Athlon broke. And since Intel is the company with the lamination problem, that isn't particularly likely to happen.
Was that good enough?
-- Carl |
