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To: Dave Parr who wrote (2563)	11/30/1997 1:07:00 PM
From: Xpiderman	Respond to of 6843

Compare to AMD's poor production yield problem, it seems that Intel has problems of production yield too high. In both case the yield "problem" can cost them $$$. Here are some interesting comments from a "overclocker" about the quality and production yield of Intel chips sysdoc.pair.com Important News for Overclockers Quite a lot of time has passed since my last update of the Overclocking Guide and now some really important things happened, which urged me to write something about this topic. Although I never included it in my Overclocking Guide, the Pentium II is a wonderful CPU to overclock. All PII 266 CPUs that I came across worked just fine at 300 MHz and as long as you cooled the chip well enough, they even run at 337.5 MHZ, (4.5x75 MHz). A simular thing used to be true for the Pentium MMX CPUs, even Pentium MMX 166 CPUs ran just fine at even 233 MHz after simply changing the multiplier. The Time Has Changed For a several weeks now it looks as if Intel has an excellent yield in the production of the Pentium MMX as well as of the Pentium II. This means that probably 90% of the produced chips are of top range spec, meaning that Intel almost only produces Pentium MMX 233 and Pentium II 300 CPUs. However, since a lot of people are still asking for Pentium MMX 166 and 200 CPUs as well as PII 233 and 266 parts, Intel has to mark a lot of faster parts slower than they are in reality. Now here the overclocking issue comes in. Intel is aware of the fact that people know about overclocking and they want to get top money for top performance. I never thought of having a reason to buy a PII 300, because the PII 266 was just as good. Lots of you advised friends to buy a Pentium MMX 166 instead of a 233, because it ran the same and indeed it was. Intel doesn't want this, as everyone can imagine. Hence they did something that they've done once before in the past. I'm sure that lots of you still remember the Pentium 133 SY022 CPUs, which wouldn't recognize any multiplier setting higher than x2. Intel disabled the higher multipliers by just not bonding one of the multiplier pins. That is the same they are doing now. Please understand that this is some kind of touchy thing when chip production starts. You can only test a CPU after it's packaged, which means after bonding. As long as you are not producing many fast chips like e.g. a Pentium MMX 233, you are taking the risk of wasting some high end parts by bonding them to only 166 or 200 MHz versions. That's why Intel never has this 'overclock protection' in newly released chips. However, when the yield of high end chips is really high, even higher than what the market wants, you can afford castrating fast parts to slow ones by just bonding it. The result of this is that Pentium MMX 166, Pentium MMX 200, Pentium II 233 and Pentium II 266 CPUs cannot be overclocked via higher multiplier settings anymore. This seems to be the case for the last 4 to 6 weeks, which means that there are hardly any 'overclockable' Intel CPUs on any of the shop shelves anymore. Only a shop that's hardly selling any and that's got a CPU lying around for a long time might have one of the 'gems' left. ....... AMD's K6 as the only real overclocking champ and as long as your K6 is real, you've got a good chance to overclock which ever way you like, either with multiplier increase or with higher bus speeds or with both. However there's a little problem. AMD doesn't seem to care much about the fact that remarking their chips can be done by a six year old child. There's only some paint printed on the aluminium heat sink attachment, which you can wipe off with several different chemicals. Printing a new marking on the 'naked' CPU is not too hard to do. This makes a K6 233 out of a K6 200 or even K6 166. Be careful with that, examine the printing very carefully. If it's done well, you won't have a chance though. The incidence of remarked K6 CPUs is cerainly higher than you think, and most reports about 'unoverclockable' K6 CPUs are due to remarked 166 version, marked to a K6 200.

To: Dave Parr who wrote (2563)	11/30/1997 1:16:00 PM
From: DRBES	Respond to of 6843

Yes, but do not really believe it. This fella is really a good guy, but he is overwelmingly optimistic (coming from me that is pretty heavy criticism). Probably what is meant is what is commonly termed "first silicon". It can easily be anywhere from 6 months to two years or more from that to full production in industrial quantities. Given AMD's indicated roadmap and times this is no great feat. Regards, DARBES

To: Dave Parr who wrote (2563)	11/30/1997 1:51:00 PM
From: DRBES	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 6843

PriceWatch now shows 11 K6-233 sources under $300. HO HUM. Regards, DARBES

To: Dave Parr who wrote (2563)	11/30/1997 3:03:00 PM
From: James Yegerlehner	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 6843

Dave- I think that's what we would expect if the K7 is going to ship very early in '99 as claimed. They need to be sampling K7s in summer of 98 I think. Remember the K6 started sampling in fall of 96 and wasn't shipping until march of 97. Jim