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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Petz who wrote (62209)	6/17/1999 7:39:00 PM
From: Tenchusatsu	Respond to of 1575624

<Anyone have an idea on length of production cycle for Irongate chipset? I mean, if there's a problem, will it take 4 weeks, 8 weeks or 12 weeks to correct it, assuming a software fix is impossible? Does anyone know if AMD has used any new programmable techniques to make the chipset design more robust?> It depends on the bug and how severe it is. Some can easily be solved with a change in one of the metal layers in a chipset component. Others could take weeks or even months to trace and pin down, much less even fix. Usually, any chipset will be well-designed for bug survival during production. If there is a bug in the chipset design, there should be ways to minimize the impact of the bug, or at least make the bug quick and easy to fix. Some of those techniques include microcode patches (if the chipset is designed to accept them), defeaturing (which will hurt performance but may be necessary if the bug is "fatal"), OS patches, etc. I have no idea what "Design For Debug" features Irongate uses, but I doubt they're all that different from those that Intel uses in their chipsets. My guess is that all their architectural talent like Dirk Meyer was focused on the K7 processor itself, and the chipset was only a secondary concern, so there wouldn't be anything revolutionary in the Irongate chipset. (One of my coworkers down in Merced-land joked about how the chipset was nothing more than a "glorified multiplexer.") Tenchusatsu