Slashdot Mirror
Coppermine Bug Prevents... Booting?
mircea writes "Apparently, a problem with the wafers resulted in a PIII bug that prevents some machines from booting. ZDNet has the story. Dell has stopped shipping Optiplex GX110. So, what happens when you combine a PIII and a i820 chipset? " Let's be honest, how often do you boot anyway? I mean, its only gotta work once, right? *grin*
Because after all, if there's one thing you gotta do before shipping a finished product, it's turning it on once or twice.
"Other PC makers did not immediately return calls from ZDNN"
It's good to see that booting up is not part of Intel's QA process since I'm sure that would really slow down the marketing and shipment of new, faster tracking devices ... err I mean processors.
Jeez, how slack can you get?!?
We just got five of them in on Tuesday. I am not one of the lucky few to get one of them...
:)
Me: "No sir, you can;t have your new computer."
My boss: "Why not?"
Me: "ZDNet says they might not boot. You may have to push the power button a second time. Dell even stopped shipping the systems."
My Boss: "Oh, wow! Can we get it fixed?"
Me: "I'll start working on it right away!"
Me: Goes and installs Unreal Tournament on brand new 733Mhz desktop!
Computers can only simulate determinism. ~Hermetic.
Not necessarily. I'm at college and so my computer is in my room. At night the fan keeps me awake and I turn off the computer. No matter what os I use the machine is gonna be booted once a day.
/.ers are all rabid zealots.
Seriously guys, it's comments like this that contribute to the belief that
I fear problems like this. That's why I only use hardware that has established a record of reliability, like my 486/66. Gotta watch out for those newfangled processor bugs, like the Pentium Floating Point mantissa handling bug! If you need more speed just overclock your supercooled 486.
Slashdot crashed and burned. Too bad, as I found it a rather entertaining story.
To summarize to those who missed it, Staples is filing a lawsuit against an unknown hacker who hacked their site. See an article on it here.
------
If a tree falls on an anonymous coward yelling 'first post' in the forest, does anybody hear?
AMD could have some serious fun marketing this.. I'm sure everyone remembers the hoopla surrounding the floating point bug a few years back, and this seems to be a much larger issue than that, depending on the amount of Coppermines that are affected. AMD should .. um .. enlighten the general computer-buying public to this if they have any sense.
//Phizzy
"Most European technology just isn't worth our stealing," -- Former CIA chief James Woolsey, referring to Echelon
This problem is not nearly as severe as the fdiv bug. That bug gave you incorrect results. This one means that sometimes you have to push the power button twice. Not a big deal.
/peter
Since then, "Windows Compatibility Enhancements" have been discussed and will be introduced, just as soon as the engineers stop laughing.
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)
Well, you workstation user, the big problem is that a lot of these fast boxes will be servers. When the power goes out it is nice to have the server reboot itself when the power comes back on. If the server does not reboot itself then a human has to find out and come touch the machine.
AMD can put out crap as well. I have several K6-200s that can't compile the kernel without crashing 10-20% of the time. Something about mem management.
Adults are obsolete children. - Dr. Seuss
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
It doesn't really prevent booting. By their statements it merely requires the power be pushed again. In most cases not that difficult. Really it isn't. Even for servers. (At least here our servers are supposed to be manually inspected after any unforseen power outage anyways.) Plus its never even been seen in the field aparently. So it may take a very bizarre set of circumstances to even occur.
On the other hand this really is bad PR. IIRC Intel took a bit of a hit for the Pentium bug. This is also gonna hurt probably. It also speaks very poorly of Intel's QA department. Even if it wasn't their fault this kind of thing shouldn't be allowed to get into the public's hands.
-cpd
Every processor sold is generally sent through two layers of testing, with random samples (fulfilling a statistical thing I'd rather not try to recall) going through even longer testing. There is a trade off -- the longer you test, the less processors go out the door. The shorter, the more chance you have off failure.
The first level would be as soon as you have viable silicon, you'd do your burn-in, and test the parts before breaking them into individual pieces. This filters out the total junk. This process simulates booting several times.
The second stage involves the finished product in a simulated system environment, running at shipping speeds. This is where they get the ability to 'bin' parts based on how they perform. This is typically done at temperatures beyond anything you'd see in the system level, to give some safety. This part typically involves booting up operating systems.
A longer test, on statistical sampling, would probably involve many applications, over a multi-hour period. (How many people overclocked their processors only to have something like Quake or Winbench fail -- it's a similar approach, run a lot of varied code.
While I don't have inside knowledge on this, I would speculate that it would have to (a) very rare, (b) only happens in a certain environment, eg, chipset or motherboard. I wonder if there is some significance to the term "glitch", which does have an engineering meaning.
It's almost a shame that Rob Collins has appearantly moved on, it would have been interesting to see his speculation on this.
..best solution ? ;-P
Amplify "noises" and broadcast over campus
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Into Windows, that is. I get about a 40% chance of Windows locking up (hard, no Ctrl-Alt-Del, no working NumLock even) on the first splash screen when I try to boot.
But I doubt it's a CPU problem; Linux never seems to encounter it.
I wouldn't worry so much if Windows failed to boot 100% of the time... but 40%? You'd think success or failure would at least be deterministic.
Not a big deal? These new Coppermine processors are to be installed in servers. What happens when you have a power 'blink' just too long for the UPS, or you're remote administering the machine and force a reboot? THE SERVER DOESN'T COME BACK UP. The system not coming up is FAR more tragic than a non-fatal fdiv bug. Why? I have to get out of bed in the wee hours of the morning, drive an hour, drink lots of coffee on the way, and press the power button again. All because some idiot paid a premium for on Intel's rushed-to-market 2nd place processor instead of buying a Athlon. If the system doesn't reliably power up, I don't want it or any of it's like brethren.
.sig: Now legally binding!
...really blows goats.
Rambust: 'Might' be faster...costs 5X as much for *maybe* 5% boost LOL!
CC820: The 'memory translator hub' makes i820 a good margin SLOWER THAN BX when used with sdram. WTF!!! They must have thrown it together at the last second, when they realized no one in a SANE STATE OF MIND would spend $700-1000 for 128mb of Rambust when even DDR266 would cost less.
Intel sez: "But But But bu bu but use i840 and 2 channels of rambust for a server. Then you'll see how good it is!" Suuuuure. Show me a i840 board I can BUY, even thought officially i840 was introduced 1 month BEFORE i820. At least a $1400 layout for 256mb of freaking ram. The server downstairs has 2gb of Reg ECC PC100 right now on a GX board, and uses every last drop of it. I could probably buy TWO of them for the JUST cost of populating ONE server with rambust to 2gb!!!
BTW, any idea if it would happen on say...Apollo 133a boards? (VIA PC133 AGP4X)
I'd love an athlon, but don't feel like soldering very much. I hope someone hurries up and mass produces those cpu attachment cards. That and waiting for KX133 woudl be great...cmon DDRsdram! Hurry up so we can all piss on rambust for real.
Intel, feeling the pressure from AMD, releases a shoddy and under-tested product? Tell me it ain't so! And this differs from their previous releases, how? At least this time they can use the AMD excuse. In the past their shoddy and under-tested products had no excuse at all. Between them Microsoft and Intel are responsible for setting PC Users' quality expectations so low that any moron can peddle just about any piss-poor programming on the market indefinitely and expect to get away with it. It'd be nice to see them take a good hard dive.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The bug was found in the Optiplex series, Dell's high end desktop machines. The article states that the bug WAS NOT found in the portable chips. Additionally, these processors are also offered in their server line. I hope a few made it out the door, too. Intel needs a spanking for a stupid bug.
.sig: Now legally binding!
On the other hand, the 64-bit Alpha processor is still young, but old enough to be proven in the field. I'm wondering.
I'd like to grab a big Alpha-based muti-processor box with at least a gig of RAM and an external RAID unit with several hundred gigs of storage, all running Alpha Linux. I'm still a bit nervous about Compaq's future plans for the chip though.
Unfortunately, every single vendor and VAR I talk to actually laughs at me and asks me questions like "Can I ask you why you are not considering an industry standard NT/Intel-based solution?" and "Can you really count on Linux to survive the next few years? Those socialist coders are going to get bored and figure out they can make more money in the real world eventually." (actual conversations) :-(
Amazing, $200,000 and no one wants to help me spend it or at least listen to what I need instead of selling me their NT-based turnkey product. :(
It's no wonder Intel and Microsoft are #1 in the world. If you are not very thick-skinned, you get beaten into submission. It reminds me of the old days when getting approval to buy anything but a S/370 based IBM mainframe or S/36 box was near impossible.
I think it's time we need another "slashdot" thread just to discuss the growing flaws of the slashdot moderation system and etc. I'll list the ones off the top of my head:
* Stories get rejected for unknown reasons, only to show up again a day later.
(maybe rejected stories should be reviewed somewhere, so we can moderate the storie back up to be posted?)
* On the other hand, there are "new" stories that link to the same article as that other "new" story one month ago. How is linking to an article 9 days ago considered "news"? (IBM porting Linux to S/390, for example)
(have another queue that shows "approved" stories - members can go in and moderate interesting stories up, and repeated or dull stories down)
* news guys that are inserting too much of their own biased opinion into the news stories, shifting the opinion of the comments before anything gets posted! For example, I'm am on the verge of ignoring a certain section on slashdot, because one news guy is frequently jumping the gun on My Rights Online, ie. how a game software developer is tracking me down with my video card model. I appreciate the intention of that section (which is why i haven't dropped it yet), but is it really necessary for the article to acuse the developer having "unconvincing explanations", then later give some half-assed retraction with "oh, this isn't a big deal really, I just didn't really think before I gave out my conspiracy theory.
There are many more problems I (and I presume many of us) have with the current system. We don't want to bitch and moan, we just want a dedicated thread where we can all give out positive criticisms.
This will probably be moderated down, but I really hope malda/hemos/roblimo and etc. will see this.
Try using it in an actual server enviroment and set Windows NT to Re-boot when it blue screens (and you know it will) and then wonder why you are getting paged at 3am because 3rd shift can't access a server that contains critical information.
YOU have to get up, drive in to work, walk in the server room, and power off and power it back on again? Do this a few times and I bet that little problem of pressing the button twice suddenly becomes a major pain in the ass to deal with. Oh sure you could tell someone to do it for you, but what if you have 20 servers in the server room all the same? Are they gonna power off the right one? Shesh.
Executive ability is deciding quickly and getting someone else to do the work. --John G. Pollard
But I have a few DEC Multia's with the Alpha 21066 chip. Not fast. But even they do run Linux, OpenBSD and Compq Tru64 Unix. So you can always point to Tru64 when The Suits get nervous about Free Software.
My problem with Alphas is their power consumption. No, not just `cuz the 21066 draws 17W and has no powersavings. That's OK. I mean the 700 MHz 21264's draw 109W (yes, thats 47 Amps at 2.35V). Alphas need a shrink in the worst way.
Now 218W really isn't unmanageable. You need a big powersupply because they're at best 70% efficient. But I have reliability worries: what happens if you lose a CPU fan or one of those heatsink nuts get a little loose? Do you unsolder the CPU? What happens when the AC goes down?
-- Robert
Seriously though, pick up any Linux magazine and you'll find several vendors selling alpha based systems and I'm sure they'd be more than happy to set you up.
If I were you though, I'd take a good long serious look at commercial UNIX boxen. If you don't need the features they provide that are still a bit raw in Linux (Journaling file systems, proven non-beta SQL database systems) or you decide that all your people are very familiar with Linux and you don't want to train them on another UNIX, then by all means go for some nice dual or quad alpha 21264's and tons and tons of RAM.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
IIRC some folks in the High Availability working group were actually working on a way to replace the kernel while the system is actually running. That would be pretty damn slick. Check around on the Linux High Availability pages and I'm sure you'll find it.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Micron is coming out with a Pentium III compatible chipset that supports DDR SDRAM. I submitted an article to Slashdot at http://www.inqst.com/ddrvrmbs.htm
which shows DDR smoking RAMBUS. I wouldn't be surprised if Micron also came out with a chipset for the Athlon, which can really take advantage of the higher memory speeds.
I suspect VIA also is coming out with a DDR compatible chipset.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
Whoa! Coppermine is a NEW CPU CORE. Katmai (read: Pentium Pro) core based PII's and PIII's have been around a while, and are really good chips. The Coppermine based PIII's are newer then the Athlon, rushed to market! Release wasn't scheduled for almost eight months. Coppermine != Katmai, much in the way K6-III != Athlon.
.sig: Now legally binding!
I know its probably too late for anyone to read this, but I found this actually in the article:
"We've implemented a stop ship, which is a due diligence move to screen for the erratum," Dell spokesman Ken Bissell said Wednesday.
Implemented a stop ship? Give me a break, its called "we've stopped shipping." These PR guys have GOT to start speaking normal english.
Hotnutz.com
I have a win98 machine that cannot stay up for more than 8 hours. The system just stops working, one peice at a time. Stuff like the modem drivers get exponentially more crashy, which is porportional to my frustration (trying to friggan download mp3s!!! stop disconnecting!!!). Occaisonallly the keyboard decides to stop working as well.