McJimbo - Re: "The Mhz gap between the P4 and P-III is going to be so big that I have to laugh at those prices Intel thinks they are going to get for a P-III.
They will be lucky to get $100 for a 1 Ghz P-III."
A typical AMDroid response.
Infrasrtucture costs - mempory, chip sets, MBs - will still give Pentium IIIs a distinct market segment.
The AThWiper, meanwhile, becomes increasingly unattractive - due to its brute force power burning, heat sink/fan costs, and unreliable chip sets from VIA such as:
theregister.co.uk
Data-corruption bug hits VIA chipsets By: Tony Smith Posted: 12/04/2001 at 11:52 GMT
VIA has confirmed a data-damaging glitch in its 686B Southbridge chip - a major part of the Taiwanese company's KT-133A chipset - and is working with mobo makers to prepare BIOS updates to fix the problem.
The southbridge part is used in the vast majority of AMD Athlon-oriented mobos, primarily the KT-133, but it can be used with northbridge parts from the Apollo Pro 133, KX-133A and AMD-76x chipsets too. VIA said it is investigating the problem to see how many chipsets are affected.
The bug was uncovered by German hardware site Au-Ja! It's not exactly a common problem: the date corruption affects large, 100MB and up file transfers between two hard drives connected to separate IDE channels exchanging the data by DMA. Having a Creative Labs Soundblaster Live card in place seems to exacerbate the problem.
VIA's BIOS fix works by adjusting a number of PCI settings, which, according to TechChannel, suggests the problem is a result of competitive PCI access.
VIA told The Register that it is a BIOS issue, and it will be posting a fix on its Web site sometime next week. ®
Related Links Au-Ja's initial report (in German) TechChannel's summary (in German) |
