Kirk Vandem wrote...
2.) I asked about PCI bus design flaws being responsible
for the slow shipping. I was told the real reason is that
SGI wanted to wait until the Pentium III became available
to ship. I even asked the SGI engineer very clearly once
again if the PCI bus problems were true. He said this was
not the case. I'm afraid I wasn't convinced with the waiting
for Pentium III response.
The PCI bus in the 320 is 3.3v, this is in line with the PCI 2.2
specification. The previous PCI specification (2.1) has a 5v bus.
Obviously you can't use 5v cards on a 3.3v bus. In fact the connectors
have a notch to prevent this. There are some universal cards that can
be used with 5v and 3.3v buses.
Since most PCI cards are 5v, this puts a restriction on what you can
put in your 320. For many people this won't be a problem since the
graphics, audio, video, networking, USB and FireWire are on the
motherboard. The few cards you may need, such as SCSI, are available
as universal cards.
Design flaw? No, I don't think so, as far as I know the implementation
of PCI on the 320 is in line with the specification.
Bad design decision? Possibly, I guess who ever made that choice
expected 3.3v or, more likely, universal cards to be much more
widespread by now.
As for waiting for the PIII, the suggestion that this is the PIII Xeon
for the 540 (in a latter post) is much more plausible. Especially
since the 320 is shipping. |
