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Pentium IV Non-bus Master PCI Bug Lives
Barbarian writes "This ZDNN article says that a bug in the Pentium IV chipset that caused a recall months ago and causes a slowdown on systems with a second (PCI) video card still exists. A talkback comment points out that this bug affects any non-bus master PCI device." To be fair, the probable amount of people that it will effect is relatively small, and even if you do want two monitors, most companies are just using the Matrox G450, or one on the AGP, one on the PCI.
It appears to affect any non-bus mastering card that is transferring a large amount of data across the PCI bus ... According to the ZDNN talkback comments, Intel has represented this as a second-video card problem soley, because video cards happen to transfer a LOT of data. However, Sound cards under high quality playback (i.e. DVD Dolby Digital output) would also be affected, and I bet non-bus master PCI network cards under heavy load (/. ing perhaps).
Ooops, thought it was the other way when I submitted the article.
All right, dual displays may be "cool" but frankly, is the average home or business user going to need it, let alone pay for it? The percentage of computer users that need dual-display setups are a tiny fraction of the whole computer market, that's to be sure.
Besides, there's this issue of hogging desk space with multiple monitors even if they ARE TFT flat-panel units.
Think about it: outside of developers, very high-end gamers and people in stock brokerages, there's no real need for more than one monitor. Especially now with 21" diagonal displays running 1600x1200, more than enough to do even serious desktop publishing work.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
John,
While having more than one display is great if you're doing program or web page development, very high-end games or working in a financial brokerage house, that still is only a small fraction of the total computer market out there. For the average computer user out there, you really don't need more than one monitor.
Think about it: a top-quality 21" Sony, Viewsonic, Eizo NANAO or NEC monitor can display even beyond 1600x1200 32-bit color at 85 Hz vertical refresh rate. I believe some 21" monitors can display 1900x1440 at 85 Hz vertical refresh rate with no problems. And these monitors can be had for around US$1,000 to US$1,200.
At 1600x1200, you can easily read two 8.5" x 11" pages side by side; this makes it VERY useful for desktop publishing.
Anyway, most new computer users who buy higher-end systems usually run 1024x768 to 1280x1024 85 Hz with the 19" monitors out there. That's more than enough to see web pages clearly and do fairly decent quality print previews.
In short, while I do agree there is a place for setups with more than one monitor, that setup is not for the vast majority of computer users out there.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
John,
:-/
:-) I personally contend that multimonitor setups are a very niche market that the vast majority of computer users won't use, if only because it'll hog way too much desk space. Especially now with the nice 21" monitors that can display 1600x1200 32-bit color at 85 Hz vertical refresh rate very cleanly.
Actually, I myself stay away from the i820, i840 and i850 chipsets because Intel seems to have WAY, WAY too many problems with these chipsets. They make the slight memory slowness of the VIA KT133 chipsets used on AMD Athlon Socket A motherboards seem like a minor problem in comparison.
But again, we agree to disagree.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
Folks,
Tell me: just how many people out there NEED a second graphics card?
That may be necessary for a very small number of games and some CAD programs, but given today's cheap 19" and 21" monitors running 1600x1200 resolution, you can have lots of display area AND still keep the menu commands on the same screen.
In short, the bug with the i850 chipset only affects people who primarily use legacy hardware. It's not that likely people will put in older graphics hardware into today's P4 systems given how good 3-D graphics cards and their ability to display 1600x1200 32-bit color have become.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
I am concerned about the corporate culture at Intel. They have a long history of shipping products that are buggy, inefficient and inelegant, but cheap, fast to market and available in large quantities.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
At the moment the only way to get dual-head on a linux box is to use two cards. The matrox driver is closed source and still beta, and simply won't come up with my G400DH. I haven't heard anything about an open source driver.
Stealing a rhinoceros should not be attempted lightly.
PIVs were designed for multimedia. PIVs run at 1.4GHz+. DVD decoding in software on a PIV should be just as good as any hardware decoder out there, if not better since software is more flexible. If the software uses SSE2, then there shouldn't be much of a problem.
I think around an Athlon 750 or so, DVD playback in software has been the equal of DVD playback in hardware.
Of course, if you need to do something else while watching a DVD, it could still be an issue, but not many people do that.
The sad thing is, this is the first paragraph. Isn't this site supposed to be discussion of *the articles*?
wolf31o2 Developer, Gentoo Linux Games Team
Of course, nobody NEEDS a second graphics card. Hell, nobody NEEDS a first graphics card.
:) If I could find one of those, I'd buy one right away. Then I could hook up my second video card. Then I could have all the goodness of a real console visible at all times.
:)
It won't let you eat, it won't let you breathe, it won't let you go to the can. No computers are NEEDED. What we NEED is food. Maybe shelter.
But you know what I *WANT*? I'd like one of those little 9" black and white monitors you sometimes see working with a cash register. Probably real cheap, too!
Can you say log monitoring? System health? Nethack?
Dave
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
I have a few of those mono-vga monsters.. They do 640x480 and (I think) 800x600 at low sync rates, but you'll have to alias ls to ls -color=0, else the console is useless. I was lucky enough to pick up slightly used units from FedEx (The Powership model that used them is being phased out.) They sell their return stuff in quantity, 5-10 bucks a pop, untested. I think the smallest lot you can snag is 50, but still.. You could prolly get $15 a pop for whatever you didn't keep on the junk show circuit easily..
You can get them new for under sixty bucks, if memory serves me. Hit up google with the search 'mono vga 9" POS'.
.sig: Now legally binding!
I am still wondering why do people run behind new/high/top/super-puper techs like P4... It is expensive, buggy (actually it is not known for sure whether it is buggy or not ;)), it is poorely scalable, etc...
;) which is actually one per cluster/network or less.
;)
Instead, one could go the google way - take as many old computers as you need (486 or something), and use their beauty. Cheap, reliable when plenty, and even more interesting conecptually (networks, clusters, distributed systems, etc).
The drawbacks of course are obvious: space, noise and electricity charges. But if you take a closer look, it becomes even more interesting:
- space and noise (and heat/speed) can be fixed by something like "computer in the fridge", which I am sure everyone read about...
- electricity charges are not that high considering the number of monitors
As I have read somewhere not long ago, Google has now more then 6K Linux servers, with the most powerful one being a P133 or something... That is interesting
Leonid Mamtchenkov
Heck, even if you buy an AMD processor (or any other processor with MMX), you are paying Intel. Yes, Intel gets royalties from every processor AMD sells.
And for any USB product also.
But if you read the article, this isn't just limited to video cards. Do you have any unusual or older cards you want to use? A video capture card, maybe? How about an MPEG-2 decoder board (no software decoder, even on a GHz CPU, produces as perfect a picture as a good hardware decoder)? I'm willing to bet that some of these devices, and others, qualify to be affected by this bug. Certainly, I have enough interesting cards in my PCI bus that I'm not about to buy a P4--including an ATI All-in-Wonder 128 for analog video capture, a Voodoo 5 5500 PCI (because I wanted a real 3dfx Glide card for playing N64 games--glide wrappers produce unacceptably inconsistent results--but wanted to save my AGP slot for an NV20), and a hardware DVD decoder. But hey, I'm not upgrading soon anyway. Santa left a little gift under my tree, an Abit KT7-RAID and a GHz AMD monster. With the price of PC-133 falling, I'm happy because I'll finally get to have a box with tons of RAM--768 MB, baby! It'll let me have a big ass RAMdisk for temp files, which speeds things up immeasurably if you do high-res graphics editing with programs that make temp files for undo functions. But, I digress...
At any rate, the problem *does* affect many people. That being said, the next rev of the chipset will probably fix it. I'd be a hypocrite if I didn't point out that AMD has had similar problems, too, it's not just Intel's fault--anyone remember the bugs in the AMD 750, which was the only chipset available for months after the K7 came out?
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
Add a third monitor and you can do tons of stuff at the same time. Code, troll the net, read docs, IRC, buildworld, watch what packets are coming through your firewall at 3am...etc, and never have to worry about "what window was that again?" Everything is right there in front of you.
Since I do different things, they are all at different resolutions. My primary/gaming monitor (which is the largest) is in the middle (21" 1280x1024) Then (2) 19" monitors on either side. The one I keep things on that I will keep refering to, such as docs is at 1600x1200. The one that I usually keep my remote connection windows on is sometimes at 800x600, sometime at 1024x768, depending on how many machines I am connected to at one time. If I want to play a movie while coding/reading docs I set that third monitor at 640x480.
As far as I know the only way to achieve this setup is with 1 agp card and 2 pci cards. I don't think the Matrox's dual head, which I have on another machine, can do it because it assumes that the two monitors are next to each other, with nothing in the middle. Someone else should confirm that though. The G400 also doesn't support individual monitor resolutions on some os's. (cough...nt...cough)
I use all three of my monitors everyday, and have found it very enjoyable. To the extent that I won't even put a machine in my home because I can't afford more than one monitor. When I get on a machine w/ one monitor I feel like I'm in a box. If I had the room on my desk I would totally add a fourth 15" monitor dedicated to watching the logs that come in from the machines on my network. There must be people out there that do it. So, even then, unless you have a quad-head, you would require at least 2 dual-heads.
The point is...Fix the bug!
This makes me wonder if I really want one. Sure, this bug's only with the chipset, not with the chip itself, and it only affects a small percentage of users. I would not be one of them, to be sure. Just the same, this just seems to be one more in a series of errata surrounding this chip and, indeed, this company's products. It seems that poor QA continues within Intel, and they don't even provide best-of-class performance anymore.
Given the QA track record thus far, is there anything else lingering that might cause "slow processing or data corruption" yet is branded minor? I don't think my next purchase is likely to contain this company's products..sig: file not found
uh... There are lots of people out there and lots of companies big and small who have made substantial investments in pci video hardware. Some of the boards (like targa's) may be a few years old but are still worth putting in your shiny new p4 boxen. Lay out several thousand dollars for these boards you will want to be able to continue to use them too.The term 'Legacy Hardware' is really kind of a misnomer considering that what you buy today is bound to be out of date within a few weeks. Many boards that drive additional video information like tuners, dvd decoders or dual display(heck even multidisplay) may be affected by this bug. Considering the popularity of these as add in boards I think this may affect many people. Sales of the 'latest' heavy duty proc's are really dependent(initially) on highend workstation/server dependent businesses(who have the power to buy or to not buy in huge numbers), not the at home gaming crowd(which usually buys after the first round of price drops).It is kind of sad to see Intel's Itanic place them in a similar situation to Netscape. (Great potential product continuosly plagued by setbacks that shouldn't happen)
Prospecting Stinks. Stop Wasting Time on Cold Calling.
If you want true dual head, get two cards NOT a G400. And the best implementations of this that I've seen are one AGP and one PCI so this P4 bug doesn't really apply here.
:wq
Headline says: "or one on the AGP, one on the PCI."
That's just it, you can not add a video card to any PCI slots, you can only use the AGP slot for video. Since there is only one AGP slot, you can use only one video card!
I have come to a conclusion that one useless man is a shame, two is a law firm, and three or more is a congress -J Adams
Oh... I agree, very few people need a second monitor. Definite niche market. However, lots of people would benefit from one. Also, the niche market is growing. Windows2000, which suports dual monitors (NT4 didn't) is just starting to catch on in the professional market. And most people who have tried a dul-monitor setup don't want to go back.
Also, the P4 is supposedly the current top-of-the-line chip you can buy. A lot of P4 users are high-end users, so the percentage of P4 users who need/want dual monitor support is small, but larger than the percentage of general PC users who need/want dual-monitor support.
I mean, how many people need more than 128MB of ram? Very few. But what if the P4 chipsets didn't support more than 128MB of ram? What if the P4 didn't support defragging your disks on the 5th day of the month? What if your car didn't support sharp left turns above 55mph? What if your toilet didn't support more than five flushes an hour?
The point is, it's ridiculous to defend an error by saying "oh, must people don't need that anyway". The point is, some people do need or want those features. Obviously this is another bad mark against Intel's name. Plus, as far as I know, every previous Intel chipset supported dual monitors just fine (MS OS's haven't always supported them... but to the chipset another PCI video card is just another PCI device for the most part). Intel's arrogance and coverups are really ticking people off...
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To be fair, the probable amount of people that it will effect is relatively small, and even if you do want two monitors, most companies are just using the Matrox G450
I can't agree with that. The PIV is marketed (and indeed seems only to be good for) graphics and video. This market segment relies heavily on two monitor configurations, and the G400/450 isn't always the card we want.
And for video production, which is the PIV's strongpoint, I guess the Matrox RT2000 (an excellent low-cost real time video production & digitizing card) is out. It uses the dual head G400 as the base video card, but you can only do video editing with it in single-monitor mode (plus a TV screen). To edit video with dual screens, which makes it much easier, you MUST get another G400 video card on the PCI bus. And you're out of luck with the PIV.
OK... so the problem isn't on the chip itself. That doesn't make it go away. Anyone with a P4 and this setup will face the problem. It doesn't matter very much where the problem lies unless you plan on shelling out for some new hardware.
states that the number of bugs in a chip design will double even 2 revisions.
Like the subject suggests.. its not just vid cards affected... is ANY card that has a LOT of data flowing through it...
I feel that, that makes the bug a little more serious than your standard Intel screwups...
"Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far
CNET's News.com had a story on this as well:
Minor bug lingers in Pentium 4 chipset
Interestingly enough, they originally had it under a very misleading title (it said "Minor bug lingers in Pentium 4 processor" IIRC). They apparently got enough feedback that they retitled it by this morning.
Tell me: just how many people out there NEED a second graphics card?
I'll tell you what... two monitors are the way to go. Anyone who's going work that requires a lot of screen real estate (programmers, artists, etc) can benefit from an extra monitor, no matter how big their primary monitor is. Also, a lot of people simply have extra, perfectly good, compatible hardware laying around they'd like to use. Or they can pick it up on eBay or a computer show...
but given today's cheap 19" and 21" monitors running 1600x1200 resolution, you can have lots of display area AND still keep the menu commands on the same screen.
Trust me... in order to get 1600x1200 resolution at a decent clarity and refresh rate that doesn't kill your eyes, you need to buy a pretty nice monitor, NOT a cheap one. The average 19-inch monitor is NOT usable at 1600x1200... cheap ones only do 60 or 70hz at this resolution. Trust me, I did a lot of shopping before I found one and it wasn't cheap. But I love my 19-inch Sony. :)
In short, the bug with the i850 chipset only affects people who primarily use legacy hardware. It's not that likely people will put in older graphics hardware into today's P4 systems given how good 3-D graphics cards and their ability to display 1600x1200 32-bit color have become.
Wrong! A large number of computer professionals/hobbiest have old PCI video cards and smallish monitors laying around. Come on, what computer junkie DOESN'T have a box full of old hardware? :) It's INCREDIBLY USEFUL AND COST EFFECTIVE to use this old hardware for a secondary display on your shiny new PC.
And anyway... your post bothers me on a couple of other points to. The "who really needs all that screen real estate" attitude reeks heavily of the infamous "640k should be enough for everyone" quote. Also, it's none of yours or Intel's god damn business HOW much screen real estate I need. I pay for hardware, it should work whether you think I'm using it in a dumb way or not. If I think I need 3 1600x1200 monitors that's my business. Intel's hardware should simply work the way it's supposed to. If it did, we wouldn't be having this discussion.
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OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
It is the CHIPSET with the bug. Not the Pentium IV chip itself.
The problem is, if my understanding of "Video and graphical data" that they are referring to, this is more than just dual monitor systems. This also means that the whole raft of high-end video editing systems are going to have problems. And perhaps DVD decoder cards, too.
I suspect that the major issue here is that Intel doesn't want to do a recall on the boards that have already been made, like the i820. So they are figuring that this isn't a major enough problem, so they are going to just let it ship.
It doesn't bother me because I'm not going to buy a P4 of this vintage. If I upgrade, it'll either be to a fast P3, the next version of the P4 and chipset, or an Athlon.
Gentoo Sucks