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i820 Chipset Under Recall
Dman33 writes "This Cnet story details how Intel hit another bump in the road with its i820 motherboards. This defect is in the memory translator hub which allows for the use of standard DIMMs as opposed to Rambus. Intel is planning on just replacing the standard memory with Rambus memory, but will replace the entire board at the user's request. " The estimated cost would put a big hurt on Intel's bottom line -- several hundred million dollars worth of it.
June 1999: I start saving up every cent I can so I can replace my Pentium 166 (replaced after the FDIV bug discovery) workstation. I'm looking forward to a Camino (i820) based motherboard.
June 1999: i820 pushed back again.
Dec 1999: I place an order with CDW for an Intel CC820 mobo and an Intel Pentium III 533EB processor.
Jan 2000: RAM, Case, cooling, power supply, and everything else I ordered arrived weeks ago. My products, which were supposed to arrive in 3-5 days are pushed back "until further notice". Calls to Intel provide no further information.
Feb 2000: It's been 10 weeks. I place a call to CDW to be told that I'm still on backorder. I place calls to Intel to no avail.
Feb 2000: It's been 13 weeks. I call Intel to merely be blown off. I file a report to the BBB in regard to their conduct and how poorly this situation is being handled.
Feb 2000: 3 days later I receieve a phone call from Intel, gravely apologizing for the ordeal. My motherboard arrives the same day after receiving an apology call from CDW in which they explained they were shipping CPUs and motherboards to 'higher priority' customers during the processor shortage.
Mar 2000: 2 weeks later the BIOS fails. I suspected it when PCI steering and DMA went awry initially, but I had gotten it to work.
Mar 2000: My new motherboard arrives, and works fine. News stories surface on yer more problems with the i820 chipset.
May 2000: My motherboard is under recall.
Now seriously, what am I supposed to do here? Send in my motherboard for a replacement that'll prolly take several weeks to ensure I won't have any problems? And what about the memory? Do I have to send them my 128M stick of PC100 from Crucial to get an RDRAM replacement? Even then, is the memory I'm going to get in return quality memory? Is it PC800, or am I going to be given PC700 or PC600 (which won't work!)?
I've been quite patient through this and I've put most of it behind me and just enjoyed my spiffy new hand-made workstation. But now something else? This is ridiculous, and Intel BETTER be kicking themselves in the ass right now over wht is arguably their biggest goof ever: i820
I plan on getting a 1.5GHz Williamette when they hit in the planned Q1 2001, and that better well not have a single problem in it, as the motherboard it'll sit on.
Sorry if this has a bit of that "fresh rant feeling" to it, but I'm just a tad irritable over this. >_<
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But RDRAM is the problem, insofar as Intel is ramming it down their engineers' and customers' throats with no regard for reality. Intel management has committed so strongly to RDRAM that they'll practically have to commit seppuku before changing their "strategy". They ought to have looked at RDRAM's risks before committing.
I agree that RDRAM can be made to work. But the reality is that RDRAM has numerous challenges:
I'm not knocking the RDRAM concept itself, just Intel's Dilbertian implementation of it. In fact, I think narrow superfast busses are the Wave Of The Future(tm). Imagine buying an extra 16 gigs of RAM, taking it home, and plugging in the optical fiber without turning the machine off. Ditto for hard drives, or monitors. Would be much easier, especially for the average person.
-- ;-)
Kuro5hin.org: where the good times never end.
It's good to see that Intel is finally handling this issue. It's too bad they didn't announce this a few weeks ago, before I snapped my cc820 in half and mounted it on my wall, to serve as a constant reminder to avoid Intel products at all costs.
(And you think I'm kidding...)
MSK
... must be pretty big for Intel to put up with this crap. Sometimes I wonder if they went with RAMBus just to prove that they owned the market. Some peopl are so gung-ho Intel (and usually MS) that they'd buy TurdRAM if Intel sold it, with a Feces Translator Hub.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
a while until picking up on new chipsets until the bugs are worked out... Like a few years later.
-- On the side of the software box, in the system requirements section it said "Requires Windows 95 or better." So I i
This defect is in the memory translator hub which allows for the use of standard DIMMs as opposed to Rambus.
Why can't they fix with the good ol' fashioned method of "reversing the polarity of the positron emission trail" or "modifying the deflector shield harmonics to emit a resonance"?
I mean, what is the problem! Are these people stupid or something?
It strikes me that intel's in a dilly of a pickle if they plan to swap regular pc100 dimms for rdram. What's to stop a person from claiming (maybe even legitimately) that they needed 2G RAM on their new mobo? Go out and spend whatever it'll cost for 2G of pc100, and then let intel swap it up to rdram? You'd make a killing!
Another application would be to buy several of these, as needed. Buy a boatload of ram for one, and when they replace it with rdram, use that to feed the others.
They weren't kidding when they talked about damage into the hundreds of millions. That rambus investment is starting to look more and more painful for intel shareholders.
This has gotta hurt. It takes a lot of guts for a company to eat a bunch of revenue like that, especially when they aren't doing so hot in other areas.
[Off-the-wall and highly improbable conspiracy theory]
Or maybe they are doing it purely to entrench RDRAM in the market.
Step 1) Oh no, that SDRAM makes things buggy. Let's replace it for free with RDRAM for ya! (Who wouldn't go for it?)
Step 2) Now that EVERY i820 board has RDRAM, more RAM companies make RDRAM, the price of RDRAM goes down, and the price of SDRAM goes up
Step 3) Revisionist history starts pointing the finger at SDRAM for being an unreliable technology, not the i820.
Step 4) More and more consumers scoff at anything that doesn't use RDRAM ("Sheesh, your RAM runs at a puny little 133Mhz! Mine runs at 800!")
Step 5) AMD is hurt by the fact that none of their CPUs run on a chipset that uses RDRAM.
Step 6) While Intel flushes cash fighting AMD, HP takes over the majority of the CPU biz. (OK, maybe not.)
Intel's engineers are humans too, they make mistakes.
The problem is, this isn't solely a symptom of Intel's engineers goofing... Intel has been trying to get Camino out the door for quite a long time now (I believe the first publicly announced roll out date was more than a year ago). If they can deliver millions of CPU's (which are arguably much more complex than a memory controller) why then, can't they deliver an 820 that works. Remember, this is a company with billions of dollars to spend and thousands of the brightest minds in the industry... They ought to be able to deliver a memory controller that works in a reasonable amount of time.
This latest 820 debacle is more of symptom of political infighting and a company collapsing under its own wieght. There's an awful lot of 'us vs. them' infighting between the various processor and chipset marketing/design teams. Trust me.
Just like they replaced all those Pentiums with the FDIV bug
...but only after a tremendous backlash from customers after Intel told them that Intel's engineers would decide on a case by case basis who would, wouldn't get replacments.
The problem has nothing to do with RDRAM
...excpet that it has EVERYTHING to do with RDRAM. Camino is an RDRAM memory controller, right? So... I don't know how you could say that this has nothing to do with RDRAM.
So please, guys, cut Intel some slack here.
No... they don't deserve it. They've screwed countless customers (think Dell and many other OEM's) with promises of Camino based motherboard delivery, and every time, they've managed to screw it up. Dell has taken it in the shorts for several quarters now due to Intel's inability to deliver Camino and Camino based motherboards. I'm no great lover of Dell, but its fortunes shouldn't be based on (or ruined by) the ineptness of a monopolistic supplier. Expect the governement to start looking at Intel again before too long... I do.
I remember Andy Grove once saying that Intel's biggest enemy was itself.... That's looking more true everyday.
Don't believe Intel's hype, and don't feel sorry for them. They work their engineers and production workers VERY HARD and VERY LONG for relatively low pay (like I said, trust me) and make up the difference with stock options. Well, if the company, as a collective, performs poorly (as Intel has over the past year and half or so), alot of the compensation that comes in the form of stocks options will devaluate and Intel's talent will look elsewhere for a company that can manage its own complexity and avoid political infighting an turf battles.
-t
RAMBUS is an expensive joke! The i820 can't even keep up with the "old" 440BX based solutions. Have a look at a March 8th article that goes into all the gory details. To quote Mr Pabst: "Rambus seems to be a rather nasty disappointment."
Not everyone will want to overclock a 440BX board to 133 MHz, but since so little hardware is actually overclocked, and even then only by 30%, you stand little chance of ruining anything. Just make sure you use a CPU and SDRAM rated for 133 MHz FSB.
If anything, wait for i815 to come out. This is supposed to be the "real" successor to 440BX.
Use Evolution instead of Outlook? Bewa
Intel's engineers are humans too, they make mistakes. But, when the mistakes happen, Intel takes care of its customers. Just like they replaced all those Pentiums with the FDIV bug.
Oh, and for all you RDRAM hatemongers: The problem has nothing to do with RDRAM; the memory controller used in specific motherboards was not shielded properly, causing intermittent lockups.
So please, guys, cut Intel some slack here. It's not like AMD is bulletproof, either (Athlon/GeForce, anyone?).
Nathan...which is why MS stamps theirs out. Intel has competition and has for some time, so they have to innovate the old fashioned way.
Of course, that means mistakes, rush jobs, recalls, and all the problems that go with them. I also tend to think that users are not seeing the bang for the buck out of these new RAM technologies. PC100 was a good thing, but how much farther can we climb in sophistication before there really is no visible difference in performance/the technology itself tops out?
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