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To: Praveen Johal who wrote (2762)	12/6/1997 3:41:00 AM
From: StockMan	Respond to of 6843

Praveen, Re -- Does anyone know what is meant by revisions? Every Chip undergoes several iterations over its lifetime, when bugs or erratta are fixed, also each iterations includes process and layout optimizations. These are called steppings or revisions. Thus the Inital version of a K6 would be called stepping/revision A. After problems/optimizations are done on the version A, a new stepping/revision B is produced. and so on..These are for all chips, both Intel and Amd. Typically, after revision B, the external interfaces to the Motherboard etc.. are not changed. Thus a Rev B, and Rev C chip should work on all Motherboards. It appears from the article that AMD's revisions do not. This could be because they have changed the interface (the cache etc..) between revisions and is generally very bad practice, as it implies, they still haven't gotton their act together. Stockman

To: Praveen Johal who wrote (2762)	12/6/1997 11:10:00 PM
From: Ali Chen	Respond to of 6843

Praveen: <Does anyone know what is meant by revisions?> Revisions usually mean improvements to the chip and bug fixes. Each revision is reflected in internal CPU signature that is accessable via the CPUID instruction. During the PC boot-up, the modern BIOS is supposed to check out what CPU it is dealing with. The frequent problem with this is that some motherboard BIOSes are very narrow-mind designed: if it sees some new CPU signature, it just may set the CPU up to total nonsense, and the board may not even work, or it's performance will be very slow. That may be the problem these guys from ESC are talking about. Regards, Ali