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Technology Stocks : Advanced Micro Devices - Moderated (AMD) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: combjelly who wrote (65669)	12/14/2001 11:38:27 AM
From: Ali Chen	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 275872

"The most likely problem is that.." there seems to be total lack of understanding of the typical signal integrity problem. Just few red spots: forum.ocworkbench.com a) "Tektronix TDS3034 300MHz digital oscilloscope" 300MHz???? A 133-MHz dual-pumped bus needs _at least_ 600 MHz bandwidth just to observe the shape of signal edges, not speaking about ringing or narrow glitches that may exceed 2-3HGz but still affect circuit functionality. And the result is well expected: "All the main clock and power signals into and out of the CPU were carefully compared between the “good” board and “bad” boards. No conclusive differences could be found." A wet finger could be equally used to arrive to the same conclusion<g>. b) "the problem is completely eliminated (or at least reduced by 99.9%) by adding a 200 Ohm resistor in parallel with the ZP resistor to change the value to 44-46 Ohms." Reminds me of "early" MSI boards workarounds, for 100MHz FSB. So, the story repeats itself, now at 133. The 99.9% is ridiculous. So, some poor guy will have not 40,000 errors in 2 seconds, but now only 40? Great! (see discussion following the Mr.Athlon report). c) "19 CPUs... 19 memory sticks ... 18 power supplies..." Dumb permutation of equipment, what a deep approach... In short, this confirms what I was talking about a year ago: current AMD's systems engineering has no clues how to use their own processors, and cannot provide any insights to board manufacturers. If the Mr.Athlon report is an indication on how AMD conducts other board evaluations, I suspect that similar underwater problems do exist in every board, which would explain why Athlon platforms have a reputation of "unstable". Very sad. - Ali