Re: Can you quantify how long Micron has been selling these or other chipsets...
I don't know much else about it, they were on the market in 1997 and then disappeared. They may have been told by Intel that they weren't to compete in this area (pure speculation, but the comments about a foundry with an Intel cross license would seem to lend some support). It supported 64 bit, 66MHZ PCI, supporting a higher data rate than standard Intel chipsets of the time, but it didn't support AGP. Micron seems to have pretty good chipset design credentials, and have years of experience. They may have been waiting for the right time to enter the market.
entmag.com
But what does all of this talk about 64 bits and 66 MHz mean? According to Groth, Micron's Samurai architecture makes possible a sustained memory bandwidth of 400 MBps, in contrast to the 60 to 80 MBps afforded by conventional 32-bit, 33-MHz PCI specifications. Groth maintains that while Intel engineers designed AGP to increase memory bandwidth specifically for 3-D-design and graphics-intensive applications, Micron's Samurai chipset brings high-performance to peripherals such as ultrawide SCSI controllers. "If you get into ultrawide SCSI, which is probably pushing at the threshold of the current PCI bus, you can put in a 64-bit ultrawide controller and get up to 400 MBps," he explains.
internetwk.com
Although minor differences in performance are unlikely to be noticed, the differences with the Micron when handling really large images were huge. For example, this machine was nearly 25 percent faster in saving large files to the network and nearly three times as fast in reading them. Clearly, Micron has a handle on network access. More surprising was Micron's Ultra SCSI controller vs. Gateway's. Although this machine had twice the bandwidth to its hard disk, the Micron's slower 7,200-RPM drive made it marginally slower than the Gateway in local disk writes.
Regards,
Dan |
