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Technology Stocks : Intel Corporation (INTC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: GVTucker who wrote (69953)	12/18/1998 8:49:00 AM
From: VICTORIA GATE, MD	Respond to of 186894

HAPPY NEW YEAR

To: GVTucker who wrote (69953)	12/18/1998 8:50:00 AM
From: S. HYDER	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 186894

Intel bidding 118.75 pre-market, up almost 2 from yesterdays close. Does anybody know of any news?

To: GVTucker who wrote (69953)	12/18/1998 5:19:00 PM
From: Tenchusatsu	Respond to of 186894

GVTucker, re: Evergreen's upgrade board <It appears that Evergreen is marketing a motherboard that plugs into a PCI slot. Although this will certainly be much easier for PC novices to install vs upgrading a processor the normal way, there must be some efficiency loss. Where would a user of this type of upgrade lose?> This upgrade not only replaces the CPU, it also replaces part of the north bridge and the memory interface of the computer. In effect, the only things that are still used in the old computer are the PCI bus, the ISA bus, and the devices and peripherals. How does this work? Well, if you didn't know already, the north bridge acts as the interface between the processor and the PCI bus. If you look at the north bridge from the PCI bus' point-of-view, it looks just like any other PCI device. Somehow Evergreen's board "replaces" this specific PCI device with a different north bridge. There is no efficiency loss; not only is the north bridge replaced, but the memory bus is also replaced with one which connects directly to the new CPU. <nerd mode ON> There are still some unanswered technical questions in my mind. For example, every PCI and ISA device has interrupt lines which are routed through interrupt controllers directly to the CPU on the old motherboard. How in the world does Evergreen reroute interrupts to a CPU on the PCI card? Maybe the old CPU isn't truly disabled, but rather used as some sort of interrupt handler which redirects interrupts to the new CPU on the Evergreen card. <nerd mode OFF> If Evergreen's little invention works, then it would be a neat little feat of engineering, if it actually works with the majority of motherboards out there. Cost may be another concern, though. The board itself costs $199 list price. Add a Socket 370 Celeron and 64 megs of SDRAM, and the total price can easily rise to $400. The conventional motherboard swap will cost almost $100 less, although it is much more difficult than Evergreen's method. Tenchusatsu