From L'INQ:
Problem with Intel 3GHz chip is accountants' error
It's not Canterwoodgate, it's Beancountergate
By Mike Magee: Wednesday 16 April 2003, 11:17
LET'S HOPE A MEASURE OF SANITY has returned at Chipzillaville, after the firm fibbed to the INQUIRER two days ago, only to retract its earlier fib and say our original story about glitches with the 3GHz/800 Canterwood combo was indeed true.
Because, like it or not, the Canterwoodgate saga rolls on, although we think we've isolated the problem to our own satisfaction. Our readers in Japan tell us that you can find four or five of these in the vast Akihabara electronics area of Tokyo, while a DIY store in California tells us it has seen around three or four of these beasts in stock. Meanwhile a NZ reader tells us there's one in the whole country.
Digitimes reports today that shipments of the 3GHz combo with the 800MHz front side bus will start "next week at the earliest".
That's not the information we have here. The earliest date Eurodistributors have got for SKUs for the chip are the 8th of May, and even then not in great quantity.
So exactly what is the nature of the "glitch" that stopped Intel shipping the products? No one has a clue nor an earthly, but we have a good idea it's more to do with marchitecture than architecture.
Every single reviewer of the combo here at the INQUIRER peered and peered to try and unearth the glitch but it was in the words of the sage, "nowhere found".
The marchitectural glitch isn't hard to unearth, given our own skills in marchitecture.
There's an inexplicable erratum in the jumper setting of prices. Intel forgot to tell everybody there would be prices and that the 3GHz Canterwoodgate ready processor was cheaper than the 3.06GHz current Pentium 4 without 800MHz front side bus.
The 3GHz chip – the flagchip so to speak – cost less than the 3.06GHz. What a screwup.
And Andy Bryan and his team of beancounters couldn't put the genii back in the bottle, given that Intel spinsters worldwide had made everyone vow they wouldn't break the embargo until the 14th of April.
Then there is the 3.20GHz Pentium 4 priced at $637 but aww... awww... it's all getting too complicated.
Meanwhile, over at Intel's own site, the other marchitecture lot are claiming that raising a front side bus from 533MHz to 800MHz will increase the system bandwidth by a factor of 150%.
Forget FDIV, forget errata and forget any problems at all with chipset or CPU. This is really Beancountergate, rather than Canterwoodgate. µ |
