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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.
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