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Intel Recalls 1.13-GHz P-IIIs Due To Glitch
KuRL writes "C|Net is reporting that Intel has begun to recall their 1.13-GHz chips, which had the best clock speed on the market, due to a glitch that caused the chip "to malfunction in laboratory tests under certain conditions." Yes, it was only that specific. It is quite clear that Intel rushed this chip out upon hearing that AMD would be releasing a 1.1-GHz chip of their own."
According to Tom's Hardware (located withing the last couple of sentences on the page), the 1.13GHz perform fine when underclocked to 850MHz.
If you can read this, then I forgot to check "Post Anonymously".
This one will be known as the 50lD F457 D0D0 bug.
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Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
The orginal articles about the chips at Toms' hardware mentioned that when the chips were underclocked to 850MHz they worked flawlessly
I liked the phrase "certain application software" from a previous press release/story. Yeah, like Windows 98, Linux, NT... little things like that. :-)
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
In that case, it's time to punish them for their disregard for consumers by not buying their products.
All this bottom line garbage is stupid. We're moral creatures because that's what works. If it didn't, we wouldn't be here. It's time companies were held to the same standards.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Instead of criticizing him outright, why don't you find the answers to your questions on his site....
Butchers make the bestest meat; sugar sugar sugar beet!
Did Intel actually learn the mistakes from the i820 debacle too? Will they become the "release and recall" company? I think it's a better marketing jingle than the "Intel Inside" was *grin*
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Anyway I've had more than my share of K5 problems under normal windows, not to mention NT.
I'm not sure which conspiracy theory to believe, that intel would make features for MS only, which sounds a bit far fetched since offering these performance enhancing features to all operating systems would make them look a lot better for any type of solution, that MS would make intel only features which shouldn't happen without the first option since the x86 spec is there for everybody to see and again the world domination thing, or AMD makes some bad parts. I never did like the K5 so I'd be inclined to believe option 3, but I don't want to assume anything based on the few K5's I've used sucking.
Supposedly some branch of the K6's (K6-2, 3?) I don't know, throws up when running 98SE, but is fine in just 98 first edition. That's what one of the computer shops in my area told me when I commented on their lack of anything AMD, no Athlon, nothing. I haven't played with the particular combination, 98SE seemed like such a waste. As did running it on a K6 at the point when 98SE came out.
AMD apparently said to the shop it was a windows issue and the processors would work fine when underclocked if 98SE had to be run. At that the owner of the shop decided to do without AMD. If thats the case I probably wouldn't have thought highly of pin the blame elsewhere, especially if they worked when underclocked.
I know the shop doesn't carry anything AMD and this is the given reason and they supposedly tested this out thoroughly and received that response from AMD, but could somebody tell me up as to whether this was ever an issue? I'm inclined to believe them because they know their stuff, and are one of the best shops in town, but I'm not big on the whole conspiracy thing. Does anybody know if or which AMD's aren't fully compatible?
If not now, when?
Well, I still feel good about not liking Tom and his reviews. It is not so much that he found the bug but the fact that "I'm going to keep this as evidence and not help Intel" and his general approach to this situation...
And his attitude shouldn't be what it is considering what he is doing
Are you really trusting enough to think that Intel didn't even consider trying to hush the problem up by making sure they had all of the problematic chips? Especially given how forthcoming they've been in the past (about the Pentium floating-point bug or the Rambus performance problems or the 820 chipset issues)? Intel had as many 1.13 GHz chips as they wanted and I didn't see anything about Tom not being willing to share his tests (and, in fact, it was a test that Tom was the first to try - the kernel compile - that probably pushed Intel over the edge). Tom was willing to help Intel, he just wasn't willing to let Intel back him into a corner.
Someone in Intel DID piss him off several years ago. Do people still remember his trouble when Intel was trying to shut his website down for posting some "undesirable" info? I think it was Pentium 2 preview with benchmarks that were not at all impressive. He was scrambling to get lawyers and money to move to faster servers. He still practised medicine in those days.
I don't think that he bashed Intel when their CPU's were clearly superior. In general his reviews are quite good, original, and present products in true light. However, the arrogance that his articles are laced with doesn't make him very popular. Money and fame can get to anyone's head.
Now we can see if AMD has the mettle to become the processor leader or not.
This is not the way to build a lasting empire.
Then I'll show you a company soon to be bankrupt.
And I can probably name some other scientists who know more about hardware than he does. What gives him so much say.
Yes, and so can I. That's not relevant to the post at hand. Richard Feynman isn't Albert Einstein either, but he's no hobbyist. Comments need to be relevant to be useful. As for what gives him so much say, I suggest you peruse his site, and see if you can find a better one on the net.
Live to be Moderated
I might have known if i had my driver's license.
-j
yay sawfish
I think Tom did the exact right thing. Kyle Bennett from HardOCP sent his CPU back, they returned what they said was the same chip, basically saying "we don't see anything wrong". Mysteriously, the returned CPU performed much better than it did before. Tom had made so much noise (and deservedly so), that he HAD to keep his proof or he could have gotten burned so hard.
Let's say that both Kyle and Tom returned their chips, had them switched with working ones, and Intel then fixes the problem quietly without a public recall (which could be easily done considering how few are really out there). Tom then looks like a total idiot who can't test a computer and Intel buys their way out of a huge mistake.
Tom, if you're reading this, you're awesome. Keep up the damn fine work.
-B
For some reason I get pictures of Intel exec's crying about losing marketshare to thier wives, and thier wives telling them that they should have stopped playing 'mine is bigger than yours' when they were in 2nd grade.
.mincus
oh yeah, intel.com is the best place to find out about vital flaws in the PIII 1.13Ghz that you just bought.
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"Rock over London... Rock on Chicago..." -Wesley Willis
Wake up, buddy. the p3 1.13Ghz wouldn't have a release date next year, problem or no problem, if they didn't have to compete with AMD. Chips wouldn't be even close to the Ghz range by now if intel could still hide behind Moore's [economic] law. The Highest end of us would be using 650-700 Mhz chips, maybe
It's called capitalism. It means that when companies compete, they have to work harder and produce better products, or they go out. So the longer this "pissing contest," as you call the free market economy, continues, chips will continue to get faster.
If faster chips cannot be produced that are stable, (which they can, in any case, as AMD is showing us every day) it is because the technology really is at its limit, at least for now, not because of competition between chip manufacturers.
If you really think that all that's been at stake over the past year and a half or so between Intel and AMD has been essentially bragging rights (as in a pissing contest) then you are sorely mistaken.
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"Rock over London... Rock on Chicago..." -Wesley Willis
they are cheaper, they preform almost equally to intels chips, and they dont cause cancer in lab rats. Now if only they were kinder to overclockers....
***There is no point in asking, you'll get no reply***
They are fallible!! Nice to see them kinda fall on their faces. Just another example to show that competition really does let the best company win.
Hell, yeah new CPU architectures are always good. You can only tweak the old stuff so much before you cant tweak no more. I'm pretty happy with my Duron 700 too. Actually I just bought it this month for my temporary computer, my old '97 era P233MMX just wasnt cutting it any more. Plan to upgrade to an AMD Athlon Tbird @ 1.5GHz come January and a DDR mobo.
"For a long time, Intel was this machine that couldn't break and AMD couldn't take two steps without tripping," Gwennap said. "For the past year, Intel has been having problem after problem, and AMD keeps cranking out more and more chips."
Is anybody else repulsed here? I find myself reminded of a premise in 'Fight Club', that car companies tally up the repercussions of a recall before bringing the faulty vehicles back to the manufacturing plants...if the cost of all the lawsuits is lower than the cost of the recall, it's never issued.
This is similar, with a twist...i find it really difficult to believe that intel couldn't find fundamental errors in the architecture of this chip before it was shipped. Like the article says, they've been doing this for far too long without a hitch for things to suddenly start going wrong. So if they found the problem, why was the chip released?
This is where the other quote comes in: Intel doesn't care. The market value of beating AMD to the punch was far, far greater than the cost of pulling a few thousand chips back to the plant, and angering a handful of Linux users in the process. Much like a couple of passengers burned to a crisp wouldn't stop the SUVs from rolling out onto the pavement, why should Intel let poor products keep them off the front pages of tech columns around the world?
Only, this hypothesis is somewhat more insidious...i'd go so far as to claim that Intel was aware of the problems before the release of the chip, and shipped it anyways...i doubt if Ford Motors would put a time bomb into showrooms simply because there was a profit to be found in it. of course, the fallout press in that scenario would be cataclysmic to their PR, but who is going to shed a tear over some poor Slackware hacker?
-j
to add, it was every processor from 350+... I have a 450, and it's notoriously worse than a 350 that an old roomate had -- but this was an issue that I saw in 95b, and had to boot to "safe" and issue the patch every single time I'd re-load my main system.
I'm planning on a thunderbird soon.
Karnal
If Intel is looking for reasons not to let millions of defective products into customers' hands, they need look no farther than Firestone's example.
I can imagine that the 'real' intel roadmap, the roadmap used by marketing, includes the occasional bug and/or recall just to keep the Intel name in the newspaper.
All a type of hype.
This sure will make the rock solid 2.0+ GHz P4's and merceds look sweet by comparison. will you buy a 1 GHz Celeron now that the x86 core has shown itself to be unstable at high speeds? (alright maybe that's stretching the machiavellian a little, but realistically, the value in the pIII name is going to have to be downgraded in favor of the other chips).
I wonder if the p4 will really swoop in and take the lead at this rate... between rambus and 1.0 GHz problems, the pIII is looking pretty bad in middle age. The p4 will be like a sleek and solid dream machine by comparison.
http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1311
Intel has begun to recall their 1.13-GHz chips, which had the best clock speed on
the market due to a glitch that caused the chip "to malfunction in laboratory tests under certain conditions."
Intel executives today cited "ambiguity in language" as the source of the misunderstanding that caused them to release their 1.13 GHz chips a bit too soon.
"We thought that the glitch was what gave us the top speed," said one exec. "Really, that's the impression we had from the report our engineers gave us. And even some Slashdot headlines."
Sources say misuse of commas or failure to see them is becoming a widespread industry problem. "There's so much focus on the dot... some people think that's it, period, as far as punctuation goes. We really also need to look at the comma,"
said an economist somewhere in New York.
In other news, Intel also lost a bundle when they misunderstood some foreign currency prices...
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
Testers are used for characterising chips (timing, functionality, input currents, etc.). Schlumberger's fastest tester (the ITS9000KX) reach 1Gbps, although according to the a schlumberger employee they mostly use a slower model (I think it was ~400Mbps) so intel may not be testing these things at speed (although, are there any pins that run above 400MHZ?). They might have left the at-speed testing to a bench setup (i.e. a computer) running windows, and that may be why they missed the bugs.
Considering the obvious problems reported on Tom's hardware, you have to wonder if they're giving enough coffee to their product engineers.
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Daniel
I guess it's time for us to dust off the f00f bug jokes that plagued Intel when the Pentium first came out....
Q: What's that 'Intel Inside' sticker called? A: A warning label!
Comeon folks, use 'em if you got 'em...let's get all this out of our system before Jay Leno and Dave Letterman get on the bandwagon tonight and ruin the fun for everyone...
The Tyrrany Begins....
Finding God in a Dog
I don't have other references to back this up, but according to a neighbor of mine who had been a GM engineer, the Corvair was killed not because of Nader's now known to have been rigged "tests", but because of simple economics.
Not enough Corvairs were sold to support an entire car line that shared virtually no major parts with any of GM's other vehicles.
The PIIs were using separate cache chips, that's why Intel invented that silly package.
I thought and still think from various sources over the years that getting a computer meant that the damn thing was supposed to work for an indefinite period of time. It's supposed to be an *investment* afterall and one of the rules of investments should be a good rate of return. Overclocking is and has been known to dangerously decrease the length of a computer's processor and it's ability to function properly. I never have been able to overclock mine and I doubt if anyone ever bothered to publish a book from a reputable source indicating how exactly in no uncertain terms how it should have been done. I't just not a good idea. I don't have extensive training in electronics and the like and I don't like hardware to die. Reliability is the main and in fact should be the only thing gudeing a purtchess after price. Where will reliability go if you start overclocking something that wasn't meant to be actually *run* at the speed that it's been forced to run at. Sure a model T can be forced to run the Indy 500 but that isn't going to be good for even 1 lap at those speeds. My point is if I am paying anyone anything I expect quality for my money not some device that was designed for people to monkey aroudn with it to get it to even work properly. No that that's out of the way I think that Intel is making a double standard by preventing people from shooting themselves in the foot by taking the gun and shooting everyone else's feet first. It's just bad manners.
Respond to s
I wonder too, if it wouldn't compile a linux kernel you'd think they wouldn't ship it. For crying out loud they know the Itanium, not even released yet compiles linux, don't they? Did some PHB walk into the factory and just switch something without an engineers consent or what? I would hate to think that windows is the only system booted to check if a processor works or not.
If not now, when?
Why so much noise?
Didn't you get your cheque from Intel to be mum about this?
How long did AMD and Intel think they could keep on going pushing overclocked POS chips out the door?
like http://www.intel.com or http://www.amd.com or http://www.pcmag.com or any of several others that aren't run by a single point of failure about a single topic that a person must take at face value. Unlike most people on this site I don't have an extra 20,000 somolians lieing around to spend on hardware. I have to take the cheap stuff. What about something about getting the cheapest real computer that will run linux or how about preformance differences of say early Pentiums (a comptuer I actually might buy in the near future). Things like that. I don't have sound hardware, I don't have massive and strange video cards, I can't (I wish I could) just pop in a new CPU that actually works, things like that. Personally with a lot of money riding on something I don't see how I can trust a fly by night operation and quite frankly I don't trust the internet very much.
Respond to s
I am a fan of the Athlon, and have been more pro-AMD since the overhyped and under-performing Pentium II was released.
So I shed no tears about this recall. Intel's position as a 2000lb gorilla needs to be shaken; they have dealt with issues like the 486DX50, and Pentium FPU bug in a less-than-graceful way.
This product was a crude attempt to FUD AMD out of the market with what looks like an overclocked part. But AMD has been guilty of faulty components as well.
An earlier poster mentioned some bad K5 CPU samples. I would go so far as to claim the entire K5 line with its "PR" rating was a joke. The performance was poor and the failure rate high.
At that time AMD was willing to do anything to stay afloat...this continued into the earky K-6 (less than 300Mhz) era. But since then AMD has been producing an enterprise-level CPU, even if some of the motherboards for the Athlon were not up to snuff.
My point is that both Intel and AMD have at times traded reliability for release dates. We should not let them forget it, but nor should we rule out one manufacturer's product on the basis of rumor or a recalled product.
That's a lot of face to loose to AMD.
WWJD -- What Would Jimi Do?
(Smash amp, burn guitar, take home the groupies)
I have no idea of what link it is (I just found the magazine at a software company's office), but PC Magazine did a test of high-performance computers. Compaq's 1GHz Athlon, and other PIII 933MHz and 866MHz computers by Dell and Quantex, to name a few, were benchmarked with 128MB of RAM and Win98SE. The Athlon never led in any category.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Wow. Congratulations to Tom from Tom's Hardware and Kyle from Hard|OCP. Somehow I have a feeling that this recall is more due to your findings than to "tests in laboratory". At least Intel reacted the good way realising they made a big mistake and did the right thing by recalling. What annoys me is that they had to wait until some chips had been shipped before realizing their CPU still had issues.
I wonder how those who flamed Tom for his negative review feel now...
"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear"
Recall? What are they recalling? They have to actually have sold some of the chips before they can recall them. Even Dell, Intel's lapdog, has been unable to get these chips in any kind of volume. This "product" was pure vaporware from day one.
I am not an idiot. Please use my name to email me.
"That's right, I'm quoting myself."
-Upsilon
"these things may have been pushed out the door a little bit too premature."
Bake for 15 minutes at 65 degrees C. rotate, and bake for another 15 minutes. let cool and remove from pan.
I find it unbelievable that Intel is pushing so hard when they are already unable to keep up with supply/demand for processors that my mom and dad will never own software that require half the speed. Slow down. put out a stable product.
Dirty Pirate Hooker
How can you recall something that only shipped on paper? Ask for the specs back? Anyhow, serves them right for trying to cheat the PIII past 1Ghz when its not ready.
Burn Hollywood Burn
is Intel's PC's used by their marketing staff. Evidently, they are all running 1st gen Pentiums. Their engineering staff defended themselves by stating that the new PIIIs were only stable up to 1.1299999999GHz.
this is a left handed sig
Someone posted recently about super cooling systems with alcohol and dry ice... woner if THAT would fix it.. Hmmm........
Dirty Pirate Hooker
do we get free memory like we did with the faulty motherboard like last time?
Wasn't it something like 386, 486/i486, Pentium.
iirc, they stuck the "i" in front after the whole "Our numbers are trademarks" thing. I think they then used Pentium because the judge said "i486? You got to be joking. Nope, you can't trademark that either" (or words to that effect.)
I remember a time when "pent" = 586, but now "pentIV" = 886. Yeah, that makes sense.
But then again, WinME = win ver 4.2 or something. *shrug*, guess the whole world is slowly being taken over by marketroids and lawyers.
I think tom haven't to help intel or amd (remember super bypass) but he have to help us. Every time there is a problem in PC industry/tecnology Tom points out it.
> Too little competition yields monopolistic power; increase competition and the consumer benefits, but beyond a certain point, the competitors start doing anything to hurt each other, at the expense of the consumers. ... does anyone reading this think Intel would have done this had it not been for the pressure from AMD?
You're right - it's all AMD's fault.
Are you seriously suggesting that having a single competitor is too many for the good of the consumers?
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Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
why does a damn chip have to have a trademarkable name?
Intel 586? Who else can sell a chip which is referred to as an "Intel 586", not only do you get to capitalize on the brand identity of your corporate name, you also get to save the $5million you would otherwise spend on some bullshit ad firm to come up with "Itanium"! Intel 586, not to be confused with the AMD 586. I don't see that as dilutive, but lawyers and marketroids have to lift their leg on every fire hydrant they see.
On another, trivia-oriented note; the Porsche 911 was originally supposed to be the 901. (901 was the internal project number - project number 901, sequentially assigned, it was the project after number 900.) But because POO-joe (Peugot) had copyrighted the number "901", they had to call the car the 911. Which became rather a humorous name, because that's the number you call when an idiot American driver can't handle a car with a rear-engine weight distribution, and spins out into a ravine. The problem eventually became so bad that Porsche built the front-engined 944 and 928. Thankfully those days are behind us, and American cars have such small front engines anymore, that the weight distribution isn't that different from a rear-engined car (snicker).
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I bought an Athlon 800mhz overclocked to 1Ghz from an outfit called Kryotech. They sell a processor/motherboard/case combination that sits on a 40lb fridge connected directly to the processor. Runs at minus 40C. We've had it running NT/MetaFrame since 8 Jun. The thing screams and only needs rebooted when NT hoses (2x/day). Not a thing wrong with the hardware.
It's long been the mindset of a lot of people that having a strong competitor in your marketspace creates higher quality products in order to compete. Not always so. Case in point: This article. Instead of creating higher quality products, Intel creates a shittier one.
How much do you want to bet that marketing (which should be latin for as much for as little as possible- but isn't) would opt to rush products out the door instead of getting some actual meat into what is being released?
The same would happen with Linux if it were doing as well commerically against Windows as AMD was against Microsoft. Microsoft would be releasing versions of their software earlier, and doing seemingly whatever it can to make money without higher quality products.
Yeah, that's nice that Apple got interesting after being worked-over in the mid 90's. Can anyone tell me why Motorola (manufacturers of Apple's CPU) continues to fail to be an interesting company?
Unless you define as "interesting", their wholesale internal abandonment of PCs based on their own CPU, and switching over to Intel-containing Dell machines running NT.
You think Intel's got problems. Intel has a papercut compared to Motorola, who was tending goal when an opposing player's skate slashed their neck. Okay, well if PPC isn't enough of a debacle, how 'bout Irridium? Shit. I just can't bash Motorola enough. Except to say that I LOVE my Palm Pilot and my Motorola Pager.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
- talk about being market driven - I just read a news thingie about Al Gore's campaign, and he's on a tirade about the high cost of perscription drugs.
Well, whatever that's about, but one of the points is, Shering-Plough, makers of Claritin, spent more on advertising last year than R&D. Anyone suprised? Anyone wanna bet when the computer industry catches up?
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
A sure sign that your company is "marketing" driven instead of "engineering" driven, is when your CPU is named "Pentium" or "Thunderbird" instead of a nifty number like 80486.
It sort of reminds me of NICs. Personally, I have always liked the engeneering/project name better than the marketing name. Vortex and Boomerang sound much cooler than Ether Link 3.
At least AMD uses better names.
Yeah, and here one of my computers is running 2.2.16. Can't they get anything right? I've had to upgrade 16 times so far! 2.2.0 should've been perfect. And now I hear they have a .17, too... Linux should be tested better, even if it means waiting longer for the kernel.
Windows 2000: Designed for the Internet. The Internet: Designed for UNIX.
due to a glitch that caused the chip "to malfunction in laboratory tests under certain conditions."
This should have read: due to a glitch that caused the chip "to malfunction in laboratory tests EXCEPT under certain conditions."
Gotta love the 'ol Intel two-step here.
I've been called a "Fucking Dick" by better people than you.
I guess recalling 8 chips is really gonna break the bank. Good thing it wasn't the 1ghz p3. They would have needed to recall nearly 50 of them! Meanwhile... 1ghz K7 tbird, ~$450 and you can ACTUALLLY get it.
Seems the review boards have been chatting about this for a few days now, but Intel didn't budge until it hit /. Now who else can we topple?
It was speculated that Intel's special mb purposely underperformed to keep the chip from crashing due to the overclocking.
Everything in this post is false.
I wonder if compiling the linux-kernel is considered to be a laboratory test/experiment! Does this make us all nuclear scientists?
Don't be so condemning or praising of the two companies. They *both* act out of necessity. AMD would love to be in Intel's position, with Intel's worries.
Both are market driven; Intel defines the market, and AMD has to become skilled at playing in that market. However, if Intel ever stops defining the market, AMD has the potential to catch up and define it for themselves. Once they define the market in such a way that they(AMD) get all the advantage, then AMD will also get all the money.
Still, I would think Intel is making enough money and has enough mindshare that it wouldn't do something so stupid as rush to market...
The nick is a joke! Really!
GPL Deconstructed
Thats because these CPUs are NOTHING more than 850s which are 'designed'(well maybe not as well as they thought) to run at 1130mhz Intel and AMD simply overclock their chipsets to give them more life when yeilds allow it, but this time I guess a bean counter somwhere in Intel is getting yelled at right now. SmokeyDP
For a long time, AMD couldn't match the fastest Intel chips. Each time AMD shipped a new chip, Intel mercilessly lowered the prices on their mid-range and low-end chips. It was hard for AMD to make money; they had to pay for research and development, but they were competing against Intel chips that had already made back their R&D investment. Because AMD was always playing catch-up Intel could always afford to force prices down.
Now, in an ironic reversal, it is AMD that owns the top end of the market. Intel still sells far more chips than AMD does, but AMD now has the upper hand.
In short, AMD is in position to do to Intel what Intel used to do to AMD! And Intel knows it and is running scared.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
You mean they didn't engage in overclocking
Increasing the core voltage (again), a much larger heatsink than even the 1ghz PIII and terrible instability under CPU intensive tasks, this sounds very much like overclocking to me.
Intel were trying to out do AMD with their 1.1Ghz Thunderbird and paid the price.
I have been reading Tom for a long time, and I think he has a lot of integrity, the kind that comes from being ornery in general. However, it is also true that when you do what he's been doing as long as he has you can get worn down by the fight, and with money flowing in you can start to have a slight bias in favor of taking the easy path. All that just to say that it is worth raising the question from time to time.
Slashdot I think suffers from a related syndrome. The environment here has grown a lot friendlier to Windows in a server environment, and with ad revenue being what it is and the relative size of the internet audiences for Windows vs. Unix... I'd just like to hear less about Windows. I don't care how stable it gets, it still treats sysadmin like it's a first person shooter dungeon, where you win by being at the console and knowing where the magic is, and being willing to click your way to it over and over... but, with all those Windows eyeballs, there's no way Slashdot is going to meta-moderate them all to hell.
So, the real question for sites like Slashdot's and Tom's is whether they can keep their "edge" by keeping their "edginess". It's a tough challenge.
That chip bears as much resemblence to the one you could see inside your desktop case, as a NASCAR Ford Taurus bears to the model you see at the Ford Dealer.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Intel does indeed have labs they can do testing at. I personally doubt that some hobbiest on the internet was the first one or in fact the only one including the people at Intel's own R&D labs that found the problem. Personally I question a person who goes it alone and does all this work himself without thinking that he is either an AMD plant or works for another concern like Microsoft to discredit everyone except whom he is supposed to discredit. My question is who pays this "Tom" guy's wage?
Respond to s
I wonder just how many parts they really had to recall. Maybe a dozen or so circulating in the benchmark community, but I hardly expect that there will be any great volumes of CPU's in the wild which need to be pulled back.
It seems this is one instance where Intel's failure to ship product might have saved them some pain.
They are looking pretty foolish right now. First the unavailable 1GHz PIII launched for PR purposes, now the broken 1.13GHz launched for the same reasons. I had heard that the PR tail was wagging the engineering dog over there, looks like the rumours were true. Anyone betting that Dell ship an AMD system next quarter?
CHeers,Angus.
Chevy did the same thing with the infamous swing-axle rear suspension on the Corvair. They decided not to change it. Instead, the negative PR got out of control, and they had to kill the car completely.
VW, facing a similar PR problem with the Beetle, switched over to the IRS rear axle, multi jointed, rather than the old swing-axle. The Beetle still sold well for a decade after that, and they're still making them in Mexico. (it was EPA emissions restrictions that killed it in the USA).
Playing the cost vs. safety issue is a game where you can overlook the negative PR issue, and it can quickly spin out of control. Unfortunately, to the public at large, this "safety" issue (data integrity, really) will be all but forgotten. Keeping ahead of AMD was more important, in the long run.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
We know that it was the processor because we took those same exact computers and replaced the processors with Pentiums of the same speed and we had no further problems with those machines. Unfortunately buying 50+ brand new processors hasn't fit into the budget for those old machines so they still just limp along. Worst part is that AMD never recognized it as a fault so we could never get warrantee work out of the dealer.
Telcos have alot of dark fibre in the States. Most people assume that's optical fibre...but it's actually moral fibre.
Well, I still feel good about not liking Tom and his reviews. It is not so much that he found the bug but the fact that "I'm going to keep this as evidence and not help Intel" and his general approach to this situation...
And his attitude shouldn't be what it is considering what he is doing
Speaking as someone who has been following hardware sites since Tom's page didn't even have its own domain...
Tom used to be noticably pro-Intel. This was true until somewhere in the AMD-K6/Pentium Pro days, when he started noting that the K6 would run at 100 Mhz bus, and the socket 7 Pentiums wouldn't. He then gradually started becoming more pro-AMD and less pro-Intel.
I see two possibilities here.
1. He judges things purely on technical advantages, and really thinks AMD is better.
2. Someone at Intel pissed him off somewhere along the line, and he has a personal bias.
It's also possible that both of the above are true.
There is one thing I can't stand about his site - since he added the daily "technical news", I have seen news bits that are obviously press releases, and contain obvious technical errors that Tom should notice. I don't think he actually reads some of the stuff before it gets posted as "news".
I do like the reviews and articles that are actually written by his staff, though. I think keeping proof of the situation was important in the case of the 1133 Mhz chip. I think if he would have sent it back the problem may have dissapeared, much like it did with Kyle's chip. I think when he sent it back they did a microcode load or something, then returned it saying there was nothing wrong with it.
None of the four chips that this group of reviewers got would compile the Linux kernel. When Kyle slowed them down to 850 Mhz they worked. This points to the chips being flaky at their rated speed.
As far as Tom's attitude, it is the sum of all his experiences, just like anyone elses is. Though he could make a concious effort to change it, I think his honesty is important in an industry where too many reviewers simply regurgitate praise.
--- "So THAT's what an invisible barrier looks like!" - Time Bandits
You mean they didn't engage in overclocking which is not recommended by intel because of reduced processor life and stability and generating a large ammount of heat? I'd say that "conservative" is pretty stardard practice.
Respond to s
Yes, ever since they got badly burned over their initial refusal to take back the bad P54C chips, they have been quite responsive about recalls and replacements.
If intel screws up again and fails to properly handle a bug/error in a chip, they will be branded as habitual offenders. They don't want to get involved in that. It would be Bad For Business(tm).
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
NEW YORK-- Intel Stock (INTC) tumbled a quarter of a point when the corporation released news that it was recalling ALL of its new 1.13GHz CPU's today.
The 1.13GHz CPU, or Central Processing Unit, is the chipmaker's fastest consumer product to date. It is unclear as to how many of the units have shipped over the past few weeks, but based on the company's current yields, industry experts predict it may be as many as a dozen.
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
This is an interesting examples of one of the pitfalls of being a market driven company instead of an engineering driven one.
Can you give me an example of a company that is not market driven?
The x86 chips that are being released these days are immensely complicated. Windows is
buggy, yes, but if someone wrote a less buggy clone of Windows, it is still going to be an overly complex piece of software
that I would not stake my life on. AMD is prone to exactly the same issues. It's not like AMD chips are orders of magnitude
simpler than what Intel is working on. AMD could easily stumble at any moment, as could anyone working on something so
complex.
Hmm, that's funny- I don't remember any recall-worthy bugs in CPU's in the past couple years. Sure, CPU's are complex, and there will be floating point errors, f00f bugs, etc- but selling a CPU that doesn't work at all? Come on now. It's painfully obvious intel is really trying to keep up with AMD here, and they're failing miserably. If you can't even compile a kernel cleanly on 3 of 3 samples, something is wrong here. While AMD may be prone to exactly the same issues, they're not about to ship a CPU that is that broken. Unfortunately I've been in a similar situation to intel's engineers, on a smaller scale- marketing sets hard deadlines that are a joke. What do they care if the technical department has to work 18 hour days?
... what effect if any the attention on ZDNet and slashdot had on the decision to recall the product. You gotta love it when news channels make news as well as report it. Maybe we should push for W2K to be recalled.
Intel PENTIUM® III 1000EB 1000MHZ 1GHZ 133MHZ FCPGA SOCKET 370 . $ 959
AMD THUNDERBIRD 1GHz OEM (SOCKET A) - AMD CHANNEL OEM PARTNER - $ 475
AMD - * ETA late Aug, Thunderbird 1.1GHz - from Authorized AMD Dist. Channel INCLUDES - 1 year AMD warranty, 1x1 logo case sticker , AMD TRAY product $ 719
AMD DURON 700 SOCKET A - OEM - AMD OEM CHANNEL PARTNER - * LIMIT ONE - PHONE ORDERS ONLY MUST MENTION PRICE WATCH $ 95
So, in closing. Who cares? No one would buy one of these over-priced space heaters anyway. Notice how the only people who found the problem are Kyle and Tom? Aka two people who didn't even buy the CPU in the first place? Exactly.
It shows that Intel is on the up-and-up when they recall chips like this one. This doesn't look like it will be as big of a disaster as the Pentium crisis so many years ago. It's good this was caught early.
Look at what Sun did with their memory problems. They shut everyone up about them. At least Intel has the quality of character to admit their fault.
Sure, AMD has fast chips, too. The problem is how hot they run. We've got Coppermines where we work that can be cooled with a simple heatsink/fan combo. AMD requires cooling or it will burn out within twenty seconds.
Intel: Get your chips right and come back when you're ready. As long as you're still innovating, your market share is secure.
aÍÍ©ÍÌÍ£Ì'̽ͩÌÍzÍYÌÍÌY
http://www.fuckedcompany.com
Just don't melt. ^_^
I've heard of companies shooting themselves in the foot, but lately Intel seems to using full automatic weapons and unloading on themselves.
I know they are big and strong but with enough crap like this won't they eventually fall? In my opinion, wouldn't it be better for them to take their spot in 2nd place and work on producing quality products to bring themselves back up?
Actually, I don't care if they shoot themselves much... I'm an AMD stockholder.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
Do you think that could be because NT is using some 'undocumented features' of the intel chips?
Not that AMD couldn't have shiped bad stuff, I'm just curious.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
oh, that bug... That explains why AMD chips seem to run at twice the BogoMIPS value of an equally clocked Intel or Cyrix chip... (PIII-750=771 BogoMIPS. Ath-750=1541.5 BogoMIPS)
If violence isn't solving your problems, you're not using enough of it. - MAJ Misato Katsuragi
marketing had everything to do with it. IBM's own AIX is also great technology, and yet... that unquantifiable difference between what is good about Linux vs what is good about AIX is within the realm of marketing.
Actually, that chip (the 2 GHz Pentium 4) bears as much resemblance to the one you could see inside your desktop case, as, well, a hardcore overclocker's Pentium 4 system bears to an upcoming Pentium 4 system. YMMV, depending on how much you want to squeeze out of it. If you would get out of your AMD cheerleader's suit, maybe you could see past the FUD of both corporations.
Light a fire for a man and he'll be warm for a day. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
Just my 2 bits here, but as a set of the Windows eyes, I'm glad /. is drawing us. I personally have wanted to find out more about the different *nix flavors, and see what the various advantages of each are. Since I started regularly reading slashdot (about a year ago), I've set up (and wiped, and re-setup, and wiped... etc) a very few of the systems (mainly RedHat based) with varying degrees of success. I like what I see, I just haven't had enough time to dedicate myself to learning enough about it to trust one in a production environment.
Did Slashdot make me want to set up a *nix box? No, it just gave me some tips, and some addresses of a few competent sysadmins who I could ask for assistance (as well as a ton of helpful links). However, had sites like this one not been around, I would've been much less likely to try my hand at meddling with Unix.... (seen too many movies about "meddling with powers you cannot possibly comprehend..." to want to try on my own.)
So, I, for one, am glad they are drawing windows admins, so maybe more of us can be exposed to the nightmare^H^H^H^Hjoy that is Unix... (sorry, MS training dies hard...)
This post not intended as a troll, though some will consider it to be one.
I am dyslexia of borg - your ass will be laminated.
Well, I think you will find that the /.ers did quite a bit by discussing the issues around the Intel chip. I think many large companies will now be watching /. to feel the vibes of the community. Some may think we're all just a bunch of free loafers but by discussing these issues we make people aware and that in turn has a knock on effect.
/. I hope that Intel learn their lesson and don't just release early to beat AMD but listen to their technical department about the real state of their chips.
I for one have advised 3-4 other companies in the last few weeks not to buy the new Intel chips after reading
perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10);'
One thing is, is that when Intel discovers a problem, be it with the P60, i820, or now P3-1.13, they always go out of their way to fix the it... step forward, recall systems, replace defective items, etc...
:) This was just a point/counter-point excersize.
What happened when it was found that a certain AMD chip (was it the k6-3-350?) had problems booting Win98? All other AMD chips had no problems, just this one chip would have to be reset a number of times before it would successfully boot? Did customers get no chips? No. They had to wait until Microsoft released a patch to Win98 that solved AMD's problem...
It really seems that Intel, for all their faults, are a lot more on the ball about addressing said faults. Not that that sways me at all... I'm dying to put together my Duron system...
Were Intel to make a better product, but fail to report the earnings and stock value growth that their investors and market analysts expect, they could be sued by their stockholders for mismanagement. Advertising can, and often is, a far more effective means of increasing sales than simple quality and customer satisfaction, especially in a complex field such as chip design and fabrication, where few of your customers have any indepth understanding of the product they're buying.
Back when Intel & AMD were only at around 600 or so MHZ you would have had a point but not anymore. G4 may be faster clock for clock but it's not even close to twice as fast. In addition, the hard drives and video cards that come with Macs are fairly low end by PC standards.
1.) p31.13Ghz may not be stable, but p3866mhz and athlon 900mhz are.
2.) We would not have ships clocked at 866-900mhz were it not for this "pissing contest."
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"Rock over London... Rock on Chicago..." -Wesley Willis
I certainly would not get something because it said so on Freenet. I mostly just like the idea of freenet and the power that one could have.
I take money and money related items very seriously when it comes to my money. Too many people have been scammed on the internet.
Respond to s
Hi.
Go out and buy a G4, people. Do you have any idea how crappy our beige boxes are, even brand new ones, in comparison with these G4s?
"But Paradox, you're wrong, the G4 only runs at 500mhz!" You say. Please try and remember that mhz dosen't mean all that much. Look at the MIPS, FLOPS, and practical performance. Biiiiig difference. The G4 is such a cool machine I can't imagine why people are buying them en masse. The hardware is just too good to shrug it off with the phrase, "It's a mac." One of apple's new G4 cubes makes a damn sexy linux box. And sans monitor they are really quite cost effective for what you are getting. Linux is in a comparable state for the newer motorolla chips, and all your favorite programs will work so long as you have the source, with a few Loki game ports excepted.
Apple should be hardware company. Their machines kick ass once you unshackle them from MacOS. So stop poking at the big guy (Intel) and rooting for the underdog (AMD) and actally buy a really nice computer based on a very nice RISC design.
- Paradox
Man of the C!!!
Slashdot. It's Not For Common Sense
Did any one else notice the time frame of Intel's planned response??? They are quoted as saying it will be "a couple months" before they are back to producing this chip. If the CPU market keeps up its current pace, they will be ready to produce these chips when they are a speed grade or two below the top notch! I think we may be seeing the end of the incredible pace of advancing speeds. I think this mistep may be the one that gets AMD and Intel to slow things down. Some other thoughts I have had....
"We've seen that when certain software is running at certain voltages and certain temperatures, there can be an issue with the software not working properly," Michael Sullivan, an Intel spokesman, told CNNfn.com.
Notice how they make it seem like it isn't the processor that has the problem...it is the software that isn't working properly. Gotta love spin!
I am also surprised by the market's behavior...AMD remains unchanged today, Intel up almost a full point. Go figure. Perhaps we will see more fallout from this tomorrow.
Maybe I do live outside the asylum?
It's what happens when the marketing department has to much power. Seems they cannot handle it.
That isn't really fair, you could compile anything that was as large as the kernel and it would fail. I have a flaky k6-2 450 that overheats (back in the day that AMD was just trying to keep up and continued to overclock their k6's just way to high) and it won't compile a linux kernel, XFree86, KDE, etc etc.. the kernel is just an easy source to try out, it isn't the only source out there...(and a large source under windows would do the same thing)
News for UW students
So let me get this straight why is a company doing a procedure that they themselves don't recommend to anyone? Also wasn't there a slashdot piece of shady computer companies that were supposedly selling overclocked chips in their machines to rip people off what about suing?
Respond to s
OK, if you run the chip extra hot, and do certain things in a certain order, a few of the 10 million transistors on the chip intermittently fail. Intel missed it in their initial tests (it is impossible to test every state of the chip under all conditions). As soon as they were shown the problem (OK, and convinced themselves it was a problem) they did the right thing -- recalled all the chips out there. This is a fuck up? As far as I can see, this is being a reasonable manufacturer.
One of the reasons for sending out the evaluation chips in the first place is for just this -- more eyeballs on the things. Like the bazaar for programming, bunky. The more people trying out the hardware, the more likely a subtle problem will show up. Intel should be congratulated.
Now if it were Microsoft, if you were lucky there would be a note on the web somewhere, and they would be happy to sell you the next release to fix your problem, but they certainly won't take their software back and send you a fixed replacement.
Ahhh... Flame off.
Let's repeat after me...
NO CHIP IS EVER BUG FREE
Ok. Having said that, of course it was wrong of Intel to release a chip that was unstable to the point of not being able to boot a kernel (that should be one of the first tests). But, you have to be realistic about these things...You don't expect any moderately large piece of software to be bug free, do you? Of course not. These chips designs are HUGE. The best that these companies can do is to find as many bugs as they can in design phase and do some rather extensive testing after taping out. The should've caught this bug, of course, but to expect every chip to be bug free is unreasonable.
No offence but isn't this pretty much the same as this article, which is still on the home page at the time of writing, which includes an update on a ZdNet article about the PIII recall.
Of course it is. But now that C|Net has said it, it must be true. Tom's hardware has little credibility. (That was sarcasm...)
Actually, there is a real difference. Tom's and HardOCP reported the problem. C|Net reported that Intel acknowledges the problem. I guess that's new news.
What do you think the biggest priority of a billion dollar company is, making people happy? Why do you think all intels chips are made in malaysia? Thats what companies are supposed to do, make money. If you were head of intel I bet your biggest concern would be the profit margin. The world revolves around money, get used to it.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Similar clock speeds between PIII's and Athlons don't perform the equally, but the difference is generally small (hence "almost equally"). Athlons perform better in some (most) tests and PIII's perform better in the rest.
If you can read this, then I forgot to check "Post Anonymously".
wow, that would be completely AMAZING if it were TRUE. aha
-Its like Deja Vu all over again!-
Word of the glitch comes on the same day as rival Advanced Micro Devices announced shipments of its 1.1-GHz Athlon.
hehehe
Hey, don't forget you can find a slow Celeron2 600mhz for $100 on pricewatch, and you can also find a (computationally superior) 600mhz Duron on Pricewatch for $61... so much for leaving the scaps to AMD!
signed, a very satisfied T-Bird owner.
If she floats, she's a witch.
Tom blew the whistle, but HardOCP supported his findings. Older readers of both websites know that these guys were quite "antagonistic" before they run into each other at some (Asian?) computer show a few months ago.
In this instance however Kyle from HardOCP supported Tom, as he had bad experience with the chip as well. And eventually HardOCP hosted the testing session with 3 CPUs (one from AnandTech, credit to them too) and an Intel's engineer, where the problems were confirmed.
I'm just pointing this out since HardOCP is relatively low-profile site, and they deserve some credit here. They are not as thorough as some other review sites but they sure are fun to read.
Yes, this is largely restricted to oligopolies (small number of large competitors), but does anyone reading this think Intel would have done this had it not been for the pressure from AMD?
In my best Nelson voice...
main(i){(10-putchar(((25208>>3*(i+=3))&7)+(i ?i-4?100:65:10)))?main(i-4):i;}
"Ship it! Ship it! Ship it!" This is what engineers hear every day.
Whether or not I was plagued by a rush to market, I received a faulty AMD chip back in the pre-K5 days. It was the 5x86-133 chip. From my understanding, it's an overclocked 486 with some extra instructions thrown in. The problem with the chip was that they left a few instructions out. Basically enough to make the NT kernel crash on boot (not a valid test I realize), my Seagate disk partitioning software to crash, and X windows to give completely unnaceptable performance (even without a window manager). I didn't compile anything on it, but I'm guessing a kernel compile would've crashed it also. The beauty of it was when I sold it to Computer Rennassaince for $40 and bought a 486-66 for $5. Suddenly my X performance made me dump M$ in a heartbeat.
:-).
Although I was biased for Intel at that point, real-world specs don't lie. If a cheaper chip can do EVERYTHING an Intel can and faster, I'll put on an AMD hat
"You'll die up there son, just like I did!" - Abe Simpson
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
And not enough Corvairs were sold because they were so well-slandered in the marketplace. Because of Nader.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Before you ask who pays this "Tom" guy's wage you shold at least consider reading the article (thus helping to pay tom's wage) and following the links, for example to HardOCP.
Then you would notice, that
a) Tom gave intel ample time for reaction (he even called them prior to posting his first article) and really tried to get in contact and get some statements out of intel afterwards when it should have been intel (being concerned about their product) contacting Tom
b) Later HardOCP confirmed, Tom's findings, namely that Tom (and they too) got a production CPU that wasn't up to spec and that no 1.133 GHZ PIII could be relied on compiling a Linux Kernel
Considering the chain of events (especially intels noncommunication) I consider it highly likely that intel would have tried to hush it all up hadn't Tom acted as he had.
Also things would have been much worse for intel if the glitches where discovered later, since then there would have been much more systems already sold, and maybe intel would have started a major PR campaign about the fastest processor on the market (or somesuch). So Tom might have saved intel from a much bigger faceloss.
Had intel reacted quicker on Toms first article they could have come out of the story even better, and hadn't intel brought their 'fastest processor' to the market with uncalled for haste to beat AMD's announced 1.1 GHZ Athlon the whole story wouldn't have happened at all.
So please stop shooting at the messenger when hearing bad news.
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
it is from the bad press that they have been receiving from both Tom's Hardware and HardOCP. It is still better sucking up and dealing with the recall than blaiming it on other factors with hardware (**COUGH**M$**COUGH). Still it makes you wonder about their testing procedures, as it took the online mags to figure out the problems for Intel.
Sig it.
You seem to be misunderstanding what "Open Source" means. It doesn't mean Linux. It means you have the option of compiling the program from source. Even if that source is on Windows...
Okay, so you could test using source code that you don't reveal to anyone, but how scientific is it to perform a test that nobody can reproduce?
--
No more e-mail address game - see my user info. Time for revenge.
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
Face it, the P!!! is having extreme problems getting past 1GHz, while the Athlon is sailing on by. I mean, remember that the 1GHz P!!! had to have a microcode update to function properly? Bah. A microcode change slows the chip down, usually disabling or correcting something--which begs the question of why the P!!! design got out the door with so many flaws.
This story makes the problems Tom was having getting his first P!!! 1GHz to run stably worth another look. After other reviewers including Anand had no problems, they sent Tom a new chip and chalked it up to a faulty part. But maybe, just maybe, that part Tom got was a P!!! 1GHz which hadn't had the microcode update? If anything fails to even POST properly without a big microcode update, there was a *major* flaw in there somewhere. It wouldn't surprise me if that was the problem Tom was having.
The P!!! core is basically the PPro core with a few new instructions and a wider path to the L2 cache, more or less. Is it any wonder that this ancient 5-year-old core is straining? Of course not; it was designed to operate at 200MHz, and it's a wonder they got it to operate at 1GHz at all. But the Athlon is all new, and seems to be feeling no strain getting into the highest speeds.
Compare this to the P4 design, which Intel admits won't be as fast clock-per-clock as the P!!! thanks to the huge pipeline. Athlon will probably at least match this new P4 chip clock-for-clock, if not slightly outperform it. And, the new Mustang(?) cores are on their way. Face it: Intel is inferior now. For years AMD was the underdog and Intel was king of the x86 castle. And now, AMD has surpassed Intel in every way, in price and in performance when you consider that the P4 will perform worse clock-for-clock than P!!! while the Mustang cored Athlons will surely perform better than the Thunderbirds we have now.
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
A: RU-Pentium -- It prevents cells from dividing properly.
Found a few articles on this already and the problem seems to be related to Intel releasing chips they have intentionaly over-clocked. I wonder if anyone has tried UNDER-clocking these a little to see if the stability will improve. What about kepping them ice cold??
Dirty Pirate Hooker
Don't use a large AGP aperture, turn up latency timers, give the memory a couple extra clocks, etc. Maybe you don't understand what the bios does or perhaps you are just flaming for fun. There are quite a few things you can do to improve performance while running at the rated clock/bus speeds.
"I wonder how
many other chips are in fact overclocked and consequently offer false advertising in the form of fraud?"
The last similar chip that I remember was the PIII-600 Katami. In order to get it up to 600 MHZ Intel specified a higher operating voltage and lower maximum operating temp.... exactly the same stratagies that overclockers typically use.
"I knew that modern hardware seemed more
unstable than it should be from it's past. Is this the reason?"
Most stability problems are software (especially driver) and peripheral related. It's fairly common for a cheap modem/scanner/printer to install a buggy driver or utility that causes an otherwise solid system to become unstable.
Reminds me way too much of the ploys that AMD once employed in trying to be the first ones out. We still have a batch of K5s that have the tendency to die at least once every 15 minutes in NT. Works fine on windows though. Sounds just like "in some laboratory situations" :)
Telcos have alot of dark fibre in the States. Most people assume that's optical fibre...but it's actually moral fibre.
I mean spending almost a grand on the stupid processor and then have to reduce speed on them (presumably the reasn you spent so much money). That really isn't a good idea.
Respond to s
I've been waiting on the edge of my seat for the 1.13Ghz chip.
How can I be expected to get anything done with a 1.1Ghz processor?
C'mon Intel, this isn't rocket science. Get with the program. You guys are so sloppy. Way to ruin my day.
Speaking as someone who would rather be given a single gunshot wound to the head and dumped into the Alaskan wilderness than deal with having a processor not last as long because of overclocking I wonder how many other chips are in fact overclocked and consequently offer false advertising in the form of fraud? I don't know why this is going on at all but I don't like the sound of it. I knew that modern hardware seemed more unstable than it should be from it's past. Is this the reason?
Respond to s
about it... guess they better. Then again, they didn't offer much explanation. Figures.
but I just read about it here.
I guess that even slashdot scoops slashdot.
If you can read this, then I forgot to check "Post Anonymously".
I'll wait for the new AMD 1337 MHz processor. Only for us 1337 d00dz, y'know. ;-)
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
Well, they've gotta do something for their product to stand out.
Their superior price/performance figures plus having the fastest working x86 CPU on the market make them stand out just fine.
I don't blame him one bit for his actions or his biases. Around the time of the floating point bug, Intel threatened to sue him over the things he said about the problems (which all happened to be true). They don't deserve any consideration by him.
IMHO, his review is the only thing that made this happen. Intel still hasn't learned.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
> there is nothing I love more then seeing big corporations fuck up. Makes me all warm inside.
:)
Especially if it's the big corporation that manufactured the shielding on your microwave oven...
Intel seems to be following Microsofts lead ... Just get it out the door and worry about the bugs later. Of course, software patches are easier to handle than recalls.
Wasn't reliability one of Dell's excuses for not making an AMD based system? At this rate they are running out of excuses. I know the quote on that is out there somewhere.
The aforementioned quote from Michael Dell can be found here.
=================================
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
Disclosure: I use an AMD Athlon in my home PC.
I am an AMD fan. I seem to always root for the underdog. However, in this circumstance, the best thing we can do is not be too critical of Intel. Companies are all too reticent to admit a mistake was made. When they continue to be chastised in the press it will only strengthen their resolve in fighting any sort of recall or admitting any sort fo wrongdoing.
Don't interpret this to mean that Intel doesn't deserve any criticism. Obviously they should be questioned as far as the timing of the CPU release, and the obvious fact that it is an overclocked 1000MHZ (just look at voltage and MB specs, along with huge heatsink). At the same time, praise is in order for making the situation right by admitting error, getting the chips back, and going back to the drawing board.
Which would you rather have: shoddy products with recalls, or shoddy products without recalls? The bottom line is that in the PC market teh one constant will always be bleeding edge products that haven't matured.
Marc
An evaulation chip that is a production chip is not a reasonable thing to be screwed up. An evaulation unit is like a video card manufacturer giving boards to reviewers in advance of them going on sale to consumers. It's the same as the retail product, but without the slowness of going through the retail distribution chain. The Intel part is the same chip that was already working its way through the chain to be sold to OEMs. It is not a preview or a sample. Think of it as being the same as an early copy of software once it has gone "gold". Same as retail, just earlier.
Walt
So, tell me.. what did the "open source community" do to keep intel honest?
The CPU was running at 37 C. That may be extra hot for a can of Jolt, but it's a fine Spring day for a Pentium III.
A sure sign that your company is "marketing" driven instead of "engineering" driven, is when your CPU is named "Pentium" or "Thunderbird" instead of a nifty number like 80486. I have no current examples of a CPU manufacturer that still numbers it's chips, (except Compaq/Alpha), which means they've pretty much all gone over to the dark side.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
This reminds me of an unrelated story from a while back.
I was but a wee lad in the seventh grade (currently, I am about to enter my senior year) when the Pentium was first released and the infamous floating-point bug was discovered. That year, I was taking a class called technology. Basically, it's shop class with a little bit of computer education (very litte) put in.
Since we were learning about computers, the teacher got some educational materials from Intel. Among them was a movie. Like many educational movies aimed at seventh graders, Intel felt that it needed a compelling plot line.
Apparently, the free flow of technology to be allowed by the new, super-fast 90MHz pentiums was about to bring Earth into a new plane of existance or something like that (it gets even funnier).
Of course, the aliens were monitoring our civilization and, upon detecting our impending transendence, decided it must be stopped because, well, they're just mean.
The best way to accomplish this (besides blowing up everything with really big laser beams) was of course to sabotage the new processor. And just guess what they decided to sabotage. Congratulations, you win the million -- it was the FPU! The class thought I had gone off the deap end when I started laughing hysterically. I had to explain the infamous floating-point incidident to everyone, and they still thought I was mad (they were right, by the way).
You'll be glad to know that, thanks to the help of a young seventh grader on an educational journey, the evil plot was thwarted. Phew!
Honest to goodness, I didn't make any of that up.
Not only does the emporer have no clothes, but I think he's got a "baby-dick" too. . .
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't it the Linux Kernal compliation test that all 3 chips couldn't pass? Without open source, how could you possibly compile the Kernal yourself? If the chip sucked but only ran on Windows and it crashed alot, you'd blame windows right? I have Win98 dual-booted with Linux and Win98 crashes about every other day and Linux has never crashed. Ever. Not once.
And it will be interesting to see if any of those that said any percieved instability was just a result of Tom's bias ever apologize.
Steven E. Ehrbar
No offence but isn't this pretty much the same as this article, which is still on the home page at the time of writing, which includes an update on a ZdNet article about the PIII recall.
"An earlier poster mentioned some bad K5 CPU samples. I would go so far as to claim the entire K5 line with its
"PR" rating was a joke. The performance was poor and the failure rate high."
I sold quite a few K5-133 - K5-200 systems without any troubles. They did in fact benchmark just as fast as equivelant Pentium (non-MMX) processors of the day at least on the ZDNet benchmarks that were popular at the time.
I'd guess that Intel has retained most of its top mental brass over the years. Assuming that, maybe these problems are creeping up because Intel is focusing its best and brightest on another project.
This is a manual virus. Copy it to your sig and help me spread!
there'll be enough consumer backlash that intel (and hopefully other companies as well) will learn from this that its better to spend more time tweaking and perfecting a product rather than just having the "fastest" or "strongest" system...for example, who in their right mind would buy a car that went 0-60 in 1/2 a second and maxed at 400 mph if it didn't have good brakes?...
.02
having a stable product on the first release would also create a loyal customer base, which, IMO, is very important with the speed technology's advancing...
just my
I guess Tom will be celebrating tonight. He said there were serious issues with these chips when they came out.
I wouldn't exactly say that (: remember ZiLog? They're still going despite the "loss" on the PC market in the early 80s.
Some people value different things. It all depends on what area of the market you want.
This is an interesting examples of one of the pitfalls of being a market driven company instead of an engineering driven one. Intel's marketing department tried to score a win over AMD and succeeded in jeopardizing their own reputation. Surely Intel's engineers knew the chip wasn't ready for prime-time but here business needs won out over engineering. AMD returned to their engineering roots out of necessitiy after their difficulty in the early-mid 90s and it is clear that they know set the tone. This also underscores the strength of sites such as Tom's and the Open Source community when it comes to keeping big corporations honest. While Intel may be able to pull the wool over the public's eyes (much as M$ does) they can't pull it over everyone's and now we are able to shout load enough for them to listen.
IBM's moves to Linux started with engineers convincing IBM VPs John Patrick and John Thompson that Linux was great technology (and maybe give Bill two fingers up?). Luckily for us Marketing didn't have anything to do with it.
Speaking of IBM Marketing:
A TWO STEP PROGRAM TO END THE DRUG PROBLEM.
1. Make drugs legal.
2. Put IBM in charge of marketing.
1000 SlashDot sigs
Folks,
I think I know why the Pentium IIIEB 1,130 MHz units were having problems.
Simply, Intel has pushed the Slot 1 design beyond the limits that Intel expected for that form factor. That explains why the PIIIEB 1,130 MHz chips are experiencing so many failures.
What I do find a bit puzzling is the dearth of PIIIEB CPU's using the PC-PGA Socket 370 form factor beyond 800 MHz. Intel has yet to ship in reasonable quantities of the PIIIEB 900 MHz or above in FC-PGA packaging. Is it possible because the PIIIEB chip runs extremely hot at very high speeds that FC-PGA becomes impractical for 1,000 and 1,130 MHz versions?
Note difference between Intel and AMD on this issue. The "Thunderbird" Athlon CPU's -were- designed right from the start for socket-type packaging (Socket A), hence the reason why AMD can ship the "Thunderbird" Athlon in Socket A format from 700 to 1,100 MHz with no fears of overheating issues. (Note that except for a very tiny production batch for a few OEM's using Slot A, all "Thunderbird" Athlons are use the Socket A form factor.)
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
sure, competition is good, but sacrificing quality for quanity, or speed, only hurts the company more than waiting for the product to work properly
How Jaded Are You?
What is he a doctor of? And I can probably name some other scientists who know more about hardware than he does. What gives him so much say.
Respond to s
Ah, there's lots of gloating going on here. Much of it includes "rah, rah, AMD" sentiment, I see. I can understand it, but some caution is well deserved here. The x86 chips that are being released these days are immensely complicated. Windows is buggy, yes, but if someone wrote a less buggy clone of Windows, it is still going to be an overly complex piece of software that I would not stake my life on. AMD is prone to exactly the same issues. It's not like AMD chips are orders of magnitude simpler than what Intel is working on. AMD could easily stumble at any moment, as could anyone working on something so complex. There's a bit of a blind eye toward and AMD problems at the moment, too, just as patches released right after new Linux kernel get spun into "Look at the quick turnaround!" instead of "Critical bugs in Linux kernel!."
The key difference being that Ford underestimated the magnitude of the lawsuits AFTER they'd put the cars on the market, not knowing that they were prone to blow up on people.
Incorrect. Ford's engineers were fully aware of the fault before the Pinto's release. The problem was a poorly shielded gas tank that tended to get crushed in rear-impact collisions, causing an explosion. The engineers brought the information to management, along with a proposed (and inexpensive) fix. Management did the math on the number of deaths, how much each would cost them in lawsuits and PR, weighed it against the per-vehicle cost of the fix and decided to produce the vehicle unmodified.
The Pinto is now a text-book example in engineering ethics. The really chilling part of the story is that the primary motivation for not including the fix was that it would push the car's cost up enough to force a reprice. Marketing had been advertising the Pinto's low low target price like mad and weren't about to back down. Thus, the deadly defect remained largely due to marketing promises.
While it's easy to villify Ford or any other company for making decisions like these, it must be remembered that this is the extreme case of a common phenomenon. It isn't surprising that by spending more money on a car, you can design it to be safer. You expect a Volvo to be safer than a Kia, don't you? If the engineers so liked, they could keep lopping life-saving features onto a car until it 1) looks like a tank, and 2) can only be afforded by the very rich. Clearly, this is taking things too far. The line has to be drawn somewhere, and equations based on cost and fatalities are the tool used to make these decisions.
In the Pinto case, however, Ford went too far. The gas tank problem was a severe one, and it lowered the safety of the Pinto below consumers' reasonable expectations of safety. That is the key. Consumers may have expected the inexpensive Pinto to be less safe than a luxury car, but no one expected it to be as unsafe as it was.
Anyway, this Intel mess is really a whole different ball game. Failing on speed promises like this isn't life threatening to anyone, so the stakes from an ethical viewpoint drop markedly. (Don't tell me about air-traffic control, none of those people would touch these chips) This is really just another case of Intel throwing vapor around. It surprises no one.
--Lenny
Friend of mine in air traffic control tells me they haven't touched anything that's been designed in the past four decades. Apparently their hardware and software is ancient and not likely to be replaced anytime soon.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I never actually did that stuff with my computer at all.
Respond to s
Oh, quit yer FUDding. The 2GHz part was Willamette, dammit, a 20-stage pipeline design with very little in common with the poor coppermine (good ol' P6 core) which they tried running on 1.13GHz. You're comparing apples & oranges.
A penny for your thoughts.
A witty
Adler
Everybody denies I am a genius--but nobody ever called me one!
How many times is Intel going to do something like this? This is at least the second time, if not third. I remember the error with the early MMX chips that had the floating point problem. Intel really should put more tests on their products before releasing them, even if it means AMD beats them to the users. This way they look even worse.
That's just my 2 cents.
Wasn't reliability one of Dell's excuses for not making an AMD based system? At this rate they are running out of excuses. I know the quote on that is out there somewhere.
They should just own up to it and admit that they are kissing ass for price breaks.
> I'll wait for the new AMD 1337 MHz processor.
And Intel will respond with a 1473 processor, followed up with a 1473r one.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Yikes! The hardware review god has been offended! Check out the HEAVY use of the word ME, mostly on the page this came from:
n tiumiii-06.html
http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/00q3/0008281/pe
I'd say that Intel has not only shipped a buggy processor for four weeks, which is finally being recalled now. Intel has also made a chain of mistakes that delayed the recovery of the bug as well as deliberately taken the risk to disgruntle me, being the first to suggest that the Pentium III 1.13 GHz processor should be recalled some long four weeks ago.
Although I don't always agree with Tom's sensationalistic style, it looks like he spotted the rat.
Around 10,000 people will die this year in accidents, about 4,000 will die in rollovers, with maybe 100 of them were caused by those firestone tires. Tires which were underinflated, worn, and misused. IE, 2.5% of the rollover deaths were caused by fire tires that were misused. I wouldn't call that a big deal. [www.junkscience.com]
The people who brought this publically are a professional organization whos purpose is to act as witnesses in class-action trials. [www.junkscience.com]
This is just another issue of someone bringing up a panic on something, so that the lawyers can come in and clean up.. Breast implants. (With no repeatible evidence YET discovered in over 10 years.) Cell phones causing cancer... Or fragrences. (Very popular in excuse in Canada, they cause everything from birth defects to insomnia.)
They just showed off their 2ghz part (not finished) and here they are can't even get the 1.13ghz part out the door without a limp. Clearly the emperor has no clothes.
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