Here's another tidbit from the meeting concerning the V2 supply issues (from "Michael" on the Yahoo board). - Chip
"The Voodoo 2 uses 25 ns EDO RAM, which is a rather unusual item
and is currently only apparently available from one source, Silicon Magic. In order to get the massive bandwidth that they wanted for their boards, 3Dfx designed the architecture around fast memory parts. In order to keep cost down they went with what was at the time of design the cheapest likely future memory technology in their expected product window. Unfortunately, EDO is a dying memory technology (SDRAM, etc. are taking/have taken over), and the main-stream EDO offerings were never that fast as far as I know, leaving Voodoo stuck with a specialized, relatively expensive memory type available from a single source. According to Mr. Ballard (I was at the Shareholder's meeting today - I'll post my notes tonight or tomorrow), the V2 components are in decent supply, but memory is not. He said he expected that situation to hold for the next few weeks. He would be asking for a lawsuit if he had lied, and he was not evasive, so I have high confidence in that analysis of the situation. Note, however, that he did _not_ say that he expected things to be OK in a few weeks, although that was rather heavily implied as I recall.
So: yes, the memory seems to be the problem and, no, you can't just use any old memory chips with V2, nor even a reasonable variety."
|
