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Where's Alviso?
DMOS writes "Intel's 'Dothan' processor for moblile computers has finally seen the light of day, but where is the rest of the 'Sonoma' platform? Specifically, the 'Alviso' chipset that is replacing the current i855 and ICH4m. So far it appears to be MIA, and Devhardware looks into why with
their 'Where's
Alviso?' article."
What's down the pike, Rethan, Mithan, Fathan, Sothan,
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Come off Hwy 101 in Sunnyvale, take Hwy 237 East and head for Milpitas. I think.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
I thought the same thing....
And it's on the left hand side of the road....
Alviso's just north of San Jose, but legally speaking is part of San Jose. Silicon Valley tried to grow north of hwy237 during the .BOOM years, but didn't quite make it, and the predicted swamping of alviso by outsiders didn't quite happen.
Alviso is where TiVO is headquartered.
http://www.alviso.com/
Take 101 to 237 east until you smell it.
RTFA. Pay your respects. Many Dothans died for this information.
Moo.
My guess is that Dothan may be held up as well pending GX-NX flag compatibility, without which there's no way to take full advantage of XP SP2 anyway and so nobody will buy.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
It was a brave one, he was first lieutenant of Alpha company, he was of major aid to Operation: "Processor Freedom" and will be greatly missed.
(\_/)
(O.o) This is Bunny. Add Bunny to your signature
(> <) to help him achieve world domination.
Maybe the lack of Alviso indicates Intel's trying to figure if Alviso is what they need to secure the market share.
And maybe this DDR2 and fastest FSB (higher GHz?) aren't what the consumers are looking for at the moment.
Uselessful technology (Air-Charged
Intel has always been somewhat embarrassed about the Pentium M series of microprocessors. Basically a Pentium M, whether a Banias or Dothan, (both of which are named after rivers in Israel) is more an heir of the Pentium III architecture than the P4. Yet, the Pentium M, clock for clock, does more work and stays cooler than the P4.
A Pentium M desktop would be great, and it looks like Alviso is that very desktop. It would be ideal for quiet media boxes and transportable LAN party machines. However, I am sure that one of the reasons why Intel is dragging its feet is this: to put out a desktop Pentium M board would be an admission of just how much of a disappointment the P4 architecture has been.
Perhaps Intel should look towards Micro-ITX and Nano-ITX applications of this technology as well. I'm sure that the existing Centrino chipset would be ideal for such mini-boxen.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
yep. There it is.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Alviso is right on the Southern tip of the San Francisco Bay. It's mostly abandoned but for a few hold outs like Vahl's Restaurant. There's an bartender named Frank there who's straight out of a Rat Pack movie. Ask him to do some magic tricks for you.
Most of Alviso is now a briney marsh due to redirection of Bay water, dikes, and nearby salt evaporation pools. On summer evenings, the sound of crickets and frogs in the reeds can be deafening.
For those brave enough to visit, it's off the 237 next to Tivo's office.
it seems that most of the technologies the new laptop chipset will enable are grossly overrated, wildly overpriced, and won't generally be worthwhile for laptop owners not running Longhorn
Naturally, Sony will be all over this one.
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
Alviso has left the building.
Yes, TiVo is there. Smelly as hell, but cool... You can see what happens to a harbor when you stop dredging it. Alviso has a an undredged harbor.
yes I work in alviso!
Seriously.
I've seen many posts on "where's alviso" but lets take a moment to talk about what alviso really is.
Alviso used to be a boat landing for "The Valley of Hearts Delights" elite long before it became the foul smelling place that it is today. Santa Clara County built a sewage treatment plant there, and coincidentally, the elite did not like mooring up to a dock that constantly smelled like human excrement.
Later the alviso landfill was built, to even further add to the cornicopia of smells that arose from that stinky marsh.
Eventually alviso was populated by low income families (GANG BANGERS) and the SJ Norte's. The whole town fell into complete disrepair and despite the cities best efforts to convert it into a low lease technology park, it still remains what it is.
The armpit of silicon valley.
From the article:
Next in the Centrino is its Wi-Fi ability. Currently, Centrino makes use of the 802.11b standard. In Sonoma, that's being upgraded to 802.11g.
The author fails to note that Intel has already released the Intel Pro/Wireless 2200BG (802.11g) and that it is a Centrino component.
My laptop has one from the factory and is badged "Centrino."
Probabaly in the same location as my socks.
Alviso is in the extreme north part of San Jose up against the southernmost part of SanFrancisco Bay.
It is often referred to as the 'armpit of the Bay'. I haven't been there in 10 years, but back then it was a very slummy area. There was a good Mexican Restaurant there that we used to visit occassionally, though.
...also, didn't they have trouble with flooding in Alviso every few years?
> 1. Use line breaks 2. Note that the first step is actually not a very wise thing to do. Don't try it at home!
3. Post witty response to correct article.Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
(Btw, cheap plug: If you know anyone hiring programmers, system admins, network admins or Linux coders in the Portland, Oregon region, I have plenty of experience in all of the above, and am looking for work. Here endeth the cheap plug.)
I won't mention any specifics, but I had a number of problems coaxing Fedora to run on a Dothan board, under stress. The Linux 2.4 kernel was the worst for just locking up solid, but I locked up the 2.6 kernel on a daily basis under conditions I would have expected it to work.
It's hard to tell if the problems were with the Dothan board or with Fedora, or with some combination of the two. Also, I was using an early development board, so there's no certainty (without testing) that the problems exist in the released system.
If you're wanting to use Dothan with Linux for development, I would advise against using the Linux 2.4 kernel at all, and would suggest testing a little more thoroughly than you might otherwise do to make sure everything is working as you'd expect.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
So now that they've named a chipset after Alviso, the next logical name for them to use is 'East PaloAlto', followed by 'Oakland'.
They were naming things after rivers, now they're using slum towns of California.
It's also sinking, a fate this project of the same name hopes to avoid...
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
It's kind of cool with all the murals on the walls and stuff. Worth driving by if you're in the area. Then hang a left on the end of 237 and drive up over the hills for a nice view overlooking the entire South Bay.
As for the chipset, why do we really need it? It's a laptop chipset. Adding DDR just adds heat, cost, and power consumption without that much benefit. (I mean, really, how many of you are doing video rendering or other huge number crunching on your laptops?)
Just my $0.02.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
There were a couple of houses I looked at renting or buying when I moved out here in ~93. Before 237 was upgraded and the Dot-Com era office buildings and accompanying yuppies got there, Alviso was mostly a blue-collar Mexican town that's technically part of San Jose, not much money, not much crime, wrong side of the tracks/freeways/airports/etc., with a couple of restaurants and some boat docks and something that was either a junkyard or a boat-building place. One house was never on the market at the right time (the lease cycle was off by six months), little place at the corner of the levees, and from the second floor you could see a large chunk of the marshes and the bottom end of the bay. (It got sold for some outrageous-seeming price, twice what my house in New Jersey had been, and I ended up paying about the same for a condo in Mountain View.) The other was a rambling Victorian that had been owned by a family in the plastering business who kept adding onto it any time they had another kid, with about an acre, a collapsed barn, a not-yet-collapsed barn, and a small house in the back. It was about three times the price of my New Jersey house, once you figure in the cost of jacking it up to add a foundation (:-), but my wife and I would have needed to both be working to be able to afford it, and both be not working to deal with the construction work, and that wasn't really our set of talents. Grandpaw had recently moved them all down to Texas, and the woman who was selling it was one of the inlaws, who told us a lot about the area - Alviso used to flood occasionally before San Jose built the Sharks Arena, but that diverted the local rivers so that the Sharks parking lot would flood instead. The city wanted to fix that, but that would have caused it to flood in Alviso instead, and you're not allowed to do wetlands construction that would cause residential areas to flood, so the city was stuck and folks in Alviso were quite happy about it.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Oh yeah, and Vahl's sucks. Scary bad. Go across the street to Maria's.
Where's Alviso?
(hint for the cluebies: You are seeking out THIS street map, around 8 feet tall, standing among the peeps.)
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
And Dothan is on Hwy 231, about 100 miles south of Montgomery.
They name all their code names after place names so that they won't accidentally step on any feet. This didn't turn out so well for Tanglewood because the Boston Pops happens to practice there. Instead of trying to fight it (there's no reason to) they changed it to another town which can be abbreviated TW. Check the inquirer or someone post the new name if you feel so inclined. I won't.
Is this a /. variation on Where's Waldo?
:-(
What's the trick? Pick the pasty white guy with last season's Stein Mart casual Fridays outfit from the crowd of business people?
Sigh...if I were Alviso, the Where's Alviso books would be pop-up style -- find the guy with the computer nerd gut.
IronChefMorimoto
If they want DDR2 and PCI-E on a laptop so badly, what's stopping them from using a 925X? No, it wouldn't be Centrino, but you COULD throw a Dothan (or any P4, be it Socket 423, 478, or LGA775) on that chipset.
Er, what?
Pentium M systems using the i855 chipset already use DDR266(PC2100). DDR2 runs at a lower voltage than DDR, thereby producing less heat and consuming less power. If you had read the article . . . no, wait, nevermind.
Now with the flood control projects completed, there is more construction occurring in Alviso. Lots of new condos. And they just finished a new power plant there.
San Jose also bought out the Cargill salt evaporator ponds adjacent to Alviso, jumping in on part of the state deal buying up most of those ponds in San Francisco Bay. Perhaps San Jose is making long-term plans to revive the Alviso Marina? Just a hunch. But for now the levees around the salt ponds make great bicycle paths that take you to the southern tip of San Francisco Bay.
No no no! Clearly they meant the street! It runs right through Santa Clara University in Santa Clara CA. You can't miss it, just look for the college students passed out in the street. (Full disclosure: my girlfriend went to Santa Clara U). (Full Disclosure 2: I still don't respect most of the people she went to school with). (Full Disclosure 3: One of those fuckers threw up on me once). (Full Disclosure 4: I went to the University of Minnesota, where people had the fucking decency to at least throw up in the hallway, and not on each other).
iRooster, the Mac OS X a
Since Alviso is practically a ghost town in Silicon Valley now (if such a thing is even possible), less desirable a place to live than even East Palo Alto.
Who moved my sig?
It would have worked if you bought land in East Palo Alto 5-10 years ago. That place is still scary, but now it's both the residents AND the housing costs that make it scary.
You're quite correct up until the last two sentences. It's already been delayed a few times. In the original scenario, both Dothan and Alviso were supposed to be released together in 2003. Almost a year later we now find one of them in retail, with the other MIA (delayed twice more). I fully understand product delays, especially considering the "issues" surrounding Intel's 90nm process. But the CPU has long since been as fixed as it's going to be. The question is, where's it's dancing partner?
Yeah, it's the home of Vahl's, one of my favorite spots. More on Alviso here....
a lviso1.html
http://www.sanjose.com/underbelly/unbelly/Alviso/
And, did they remember to document it this time?
I don't think the Pentium M (basically a pentium 3 with a lot of p4-based enhancements) is bus-compatible with the Pentium 4 (lest we would be seeing PM-based desktop boards flying off the mills).
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
Another technology making its appearance in Alviso is PCI Express (PCIe). I'm not quite sure where the benefit is for this currently
This guy doesn't get it. PCI express means fewer runs on your board, thus easier routing. Why is it hard to figure out how that would help in a cramped design such as Alviso is targeted at? Even if the end devices don't end up being PCIe, the PXH PCIe to PCIx bridge will add flexibility in component placement.
Beyond that, the article was a waste of time, vague conjecture, a mild rant on DDR2 memory pricing, and no answers. Sigh.
-michael
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.