Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

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

To: niceguy767 who wrote (99296)	3/21/2000 10:46:00 AM
From: milo_morai	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1578299

ECC SDRAM Bug Turns Out to be i840's Killer The recently released bug, saying that i840 is supposed to fail with ECC-SDRAM, was almost a killer for this chipset. Due to the high prices of RDRAM and due to the dual-channel architecture, i840 was an attractive solution for an SDRAM platform with 133 MHz FSB-support, using onboard MTHs. i840 was supposed to be used as workstation/server platform, where large amounts of ECC-memory are rather common. After the bug-release i840 ceased to be an interesting platform for systems using ECC-memory, unless the user accepted the high price of ECC-RDRAM. The result was that Taiwanese motherboard makers dropped their i840-plans, because there's only a minority of customers who have enough money to buy large amounts (1-2 GB) of RDRAM for their servers. Show Me an Intel Platform for Pentium III Xeon Processors at 133 MHz FSB! You may not be aware of it, but the recent i840 ECC fiasco puts Intel in an even more ridiculous situation when it comes down to platforms for their latest processors. I wonder if you can answer this question. "In which workstation or server platform can you stick a Pentium III Xeon 800EB?" Well, unless you find a Slot2-motherboard with i840 (which doesn't exist to my knowledge), you are pretty much left out in the rain. Intel has currently no server chipset with 133 MHz FSB-support and there are no Slot2-motherboards for 133 MHz FSB Xeon processors from Intel! Intel's 840 chipset was never designed for the high-end server, but only for workstations and entry-level servers. Now since i840 fails to support ECC-SDRAM there is no alternative server chipset from Intel that would support Intel's fastest Xeon-processors. Is that crazy or what? The only alternative is ServerWorks' ServerSet III chipset, a server/workstation chipset that comes in three different flavors, supporting 133 MHz FSB, PC133 SDRAM, but no RDRAM. Giga-Pentium III and Intel 840 - A Good Solution? Well, the answer to that question will end up in an 'if - then' answer. If you don't mind about the high price of RDRAM, then YES it is a solution that's way ahead of i820 as well as any Giga-Athlon-platform. If you don't want to run a BX-platform out of spec at 133 MHz FSB, then i840 is the fastest platform for Giga-PIII. If you don't want to use RDRAM, then you better forget about i840. If you want to run a Giga-Server, you better look at the ServerSet III HE chipset from ServerWorks. If you simply want Giga-performance at an affordable price, you might want to either look at Giga-Pentium III on VIA's Apollo Pro 133A chipset or at Giga-Athlon on VIA's Apollo KX133 chipset instead. i840's dual Rambus-channel architecture offers a much better performance than i820. We will see in the benchmark results, if i840 is able to outperform 440BX at 133 MHz FSB as well. The results from my latest platform article make that more than questionable though. www7.tomshardware.com