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

To: Tony Viola who wrote (119014)	7/3/2000 8:06:15 PM
From: dougSF30	Respond to of 1578183

Yeah, see my follow-up, Tony: I allowed that the only possible objection I could think of was that all other motherboards are 'over-spec', the Gateway board is just at spec, but the Tbird is exactly slightly more demanding than spec @ 1 GHz. Even in that unlikely case, I'd be hesitant to call it a Tbird problem, if only because the fix will lie in the motherboard, not the CPU. If I were AMD, I wouldn't be thrilled, but I'd be much more comfortable knowing my chips ran fine in everyone else's motherboards. And I wouldn't be making public statements to the effect that the Tbird was not the problem, unless I knew it for a fact. At any rate, my money is on one of two things: (1) power supply (2) mobo trace-lengths/timings/signal-strengths at the limit, enough to cause a few percent to fail sporadically. I'll be happy once it is behind us. Doug

To: Tony Viola who wrote (119014)	7/3/2000 8:06:04 PM
From: dougSF30	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1578183

Yeah, see my follow-up, Tony: I allowed that the only possible objection I could think of was that all other motherboards are 'over-spec', the Gateway board is just at spec, but the Tbird is exactly slightly more demanding than spec @ 1 GHz. Even in that unlikely case, I'd be hesitant to call it a Tbird problem, if only because the fix will lie in the motherboard, not the CPU. If I were AMD, I wouldn't be thrilled, but I'd be much more comfortable knowing my chips ran fine in everyone else's motherboards. And I wouldn't be making public statements to the effect that the Tbird was not the problem, unless I knew it for a fact. At any rate, my money is on one of two things: (1) power supply (2) mobo trace-lengths/timings/signal-strengths at the limit, enough to cause a few percent to fail sporadically. I'll be happy once it is behind us. Doug

To: Tony Viola who wrote (119014)	7/3/2000 8:06:19 PM
From: dougSF30	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1578183

Yeah, see my follow-up, Tony: I allowed that the only possible objection I could think of was that all other motherboards are 'over-spec', the Gateway board is just at spec, but the Tbird is exactly slightly more demanding than spec @ 1 GHz. Even in that unlikely case, I'd be hesitant to call it a Tbird problem, if only because the fix will lie in the motherboard, not the CPU. If I were AMD, I wouldn't be thrilled, but I'd be much more comfortable knowing my chips ran fine in everyone else's motherboards. And I wouldn't be making public statements to the effect that the Tbird was not the problem, unless I knew it for a fact. At any rate, my money is on one of two things: (1) power supply (2) mobo trace-lengths/timings/signal-strengths at the limit, enough to cause a few percent to fail sporadically. I'll be happy once it is behind us. Doug

To: Tony Viola who wrote (119014)	7/3/2000 8:49:38 PM
From: Dan3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1578183

Re: In any event, I would feel uneasy, whether I were Gateway or AMD... Tony, We had a server down this morning. It's a standard OEM/VAR Supermicro dual PII 350 with a Supermicro motherboard in a supermicro SC701 dual redundant power supply case. It's running NT4 SP6a. This was an expensive box. This particular server does nothing but serve files. No database, no web server, it's not even a print server. But it locks up every couple of months. We have a GAO security audit coming up and our security people were running ISS scans over the weekend, so my guess is that's what brought it down this time. Meanwhile, the most heavily loaded PC server we have right now is using an MSI 6195 K7PRO motherboard (a little over a hundred bucks on pricewatch right now) with an 700MHZ Athlon. The K7 machine is running IIS, SQL Server 7, SDE (spatial database engine), Arcserve Enterprise and runs a 240 gigabyte HP tape jukebox that backs it up and 2 other servers every night. SQL Server and SDE are still being ramped up on it, so they haven't yet provided terribly heavy loads, but the backup hammers the machine for about 8 hours straight during each full backup. Arcserve enters and indexes the name and path of every file it backs up into a database as it backs up. 120+ gig of files represent a lot of transactions into that database, and that database gets hammered for 8 hours straight. Both machines are equipped with 512 meg of SDRAM. The Athlon (so far) has never crashed or locked up. The Pentium machine does so occasionally. So do you conclude that the Pentium II has "problems" and shouldn't have ever been used in production machines? Maybe Intel should "fix" the PII before it tries to ship the PIII. Dan