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

To: Dan3 who wrote (71159)	9/8/1999 4:03:00 AM
From: Bilow	Respond to of 1576663

Hi Dan3; An interesting thing happened at Tom's guides when he overclocked his Athlon and Pentium III. It was always the case among overclockers that INTC parts were believed to be generally most suitable for overclocking due to the larger amount of timing margin built into them. In fact, I am typing this on an overclocked Pentium II, which has been running for years with only one problem, she burned out her first cooling fan. (Overclockers tell me that this is to be expected.) But the new Athlon is overclocking without problems, while the Pentium III is auguring in: Only one PIII 600 in the THG-lab was able to walk through all tests, and I had to use additional fans to keep the PIII 650 alive. This is not how it used to be. I always praised Intel CPUs as highly overclockable, but PIII 600 is different. www5.tomshardware.com Is the Pentium III-600 the fastest bin for Pentium IIIs? If so, this would indicate that INTC has got some real problems with the Athlon. Simply put, the AMD part has a lot better timing margins, and I bet that they are going to be able to ramp up production a lot better than people are currently betting against. Incidentally, my overclocked Pentium II is also being over-voltaged, if I remember correctly. (It was a long time ago.) My doing this is another example of that fact of digital logic, it is always easier to get a prototype to run than production. If INTC overclocked and overvoltaged all their processors, their would be a disaster. But by taking advantage of the margins in their products, I can run my machine 15% or so faster than the specification. It is these sorts of margins that Rambus is going to have big problems with. There just isn't any margin for any deviation from perfection in that design, and that is a recipe for failure in production. Smooth production just isn't going to happen. Trust me. -- Carl P.S. The problem with getting Athlons up here in Seattle is probably due to the summer we enjoyed yesterday, and part of today. Things were back to normal quickly, though.