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Technology Stocks : Dell Technologies Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: stock bull who wrote (166689)	8/31/2001 12:12:43 PM
From: Meathead	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 176387

Re: By the way, where did you get your percentage failures from. I have lots of contacts from my years in the industry. The last data I saw was about a year ago that compared the top 5 vendors to one another in consumer and corporate desktop and portables. As for measuring as PPM, it's not a standard generally applied to systems although some companies may still use it. A 5% failure rate would be written as 50,000 PPM but it would still calculate the same ratio. PPM and MTBF still seems to be used more for IC's, connectors, discreets and peripherals. As for testing and specs... you bet. Every component within a system is spec'd to operate within certain parameters as set forth by industry guidelines. For instance, DDR as defined by JEDEC. Mechanical, thermal, timing, signal integrity, AC/DC specs and even including how the memory modules should be laid out in CAD, their trace lengths, impedance, number of vias, layer count so on and so forth are well defined. And if your device is to be deemd compliant, it must adhere. However, many vendors ignore these guidelines for various reasons. Many times adhering to the spec is difficult and costly so corners are cut. Sometimes the specifics are mis-interpreted or not understood by the vendor and they just plain do some things wrong. Sometimes they even lie about their testing results to show that their parts are within the industry standard specs. I seen all of the above happen more times that I thought possible. It's amazing. For companies like Dell and GTW etc. performing a detailed quality audit of the design for every component from every vendor is impossible so they rely on system stress tests to catch failures. Although this is the best approach known to weed out marginal suppliers or find defects for them to correct before you ship, it's by no means all inclusive because it's only performed on a limited sample size. The real quality of selected components on the approved supplier list is'nt fully evident until 100's of thousands of units are shipped and enough data can be gathered. By then it's too late. Vendors know this and can usually get away with cutting corners without serious quality problems. Other times, the wrong combination of silicon and fiberglass can lead to a high failure rate. But a lot of times it's not that vendors don't try to do a good job, it's just that they can't. There are way too many incompetent and/or young inexperienced engineers in this field today. Most management is not capable of understanding the minute technical details that their engineering teams encounter on a daily basis so it's hard for them to spot real problems. If a systems designer like Dell designs a robust memory interface, and the BIOS guys know how to adjust all of the complicated timing and IO buffer strength slew rate parameters required for all of the different memory loading configurations that the system will possibly see, it can compensate for bad memory module designs. If a lesser company like say emachines has a poor layout and only accounts for a subset of loading permutations, you might see many more failures... especially when plug in that second 128MB memory module you got from Fry's. I know I'm rambling but the point is, even though all of these machines and their components will perform exactly the same tasks, some will be much more reliable than others due to design expertise and vendor qualification. Designing a system is not just a connect the dots exercise as many think. There are thousands of decisions, risks and trade-offs that must be evaluated. No two companies make all the same decisions for what seem to the consumer like identical boxes. And as we all know, computers don't have many hard failures, just lots of lock-ups and compatibility problems with components or software that don't play well together. And as a consumer, you may not find this out about your system until after you've plunked down some bucks for a nifty piece of software or that screaming fast video card upgrade you've been wanting. But when you buy a new machine, your probably going to stick with it for at least 3 years... and think of how many hours you'll be spending on it and how much important data will be fed into it and stored on it to help you make decisions. It's probably not worth saving a few bucks on since they are all basically the same price these days. I'm not saying that Dell's quality is superior to the other manufacturers cause someone will always jump on the thread and say they ordered a Dell that didn't work and had to send it back so the company's crap. Speaking from my own experience, I've always had good luck with their products. And having the highest customer satisfaction ratings has to account for something. MEATHEAD