Date: Fri, 10 Nov 2000 21:49:44 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: cdillon@wolves.k12.mo.us (Chris Dillon) Cc: jgowdy@home.com (Jeremiah Gowdy), ktsin@acm.org (KT Sin), freebsd-smp@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: via chipset and SMP Message-ID: <200011102149.OAA00930@usr08.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0011101303530.17251-100000@mail.wolves.k12.mo.us> from "Chris Dillon" at Nov 10, 2000 01:28:47 PM
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
[ ... VIA chipsets ... ] > Sure, the chipsets do work. Sometimes. Maybe. If you hold your > toungue just right. The problem is not usually reliability so much as > compatibility. I can't count how many times I've read README files > for Windows drivers that point out some particular quirk that X > product or driver has with this or that VIA or SiS or ALi chipset. I > rarely ever see those types of "quirks" for Intel chipsets (or AMD's > yet, for that matter, even though they only have the 750 and just > recently the 760 to speak of). Intel has only recently, in the lifetime of PCI, proven itself capable of producing chipsets able to support more than 2 PCI bus master devices simultaneously. My personal experience with SiS chipsets has been very positive; at the time I got my first EISA system, the SiS machines were the only ones capable of running without 4-3-3 or worse, in terms of wait states (the one I have runs 2-1-1). Yes, you occasionally have bad chipsets, but I argue that Mercury, Neptune, and Natoma chipsets all have well recognized bugs. Let us also not forget the large number of Intel 8259 compatability hadrware bugs, their floppy controller bugs, the RZ1000 bug (it recently rose from the dead), the F00F bug, and the famous floating point bug. SMP adds stepping incompatability issues, which were otherwise invisible until you plugged in the second processor. I think you could probably point at any given manufacturer and find bad chips under their covers (e.g. the Cyrix 5520 and 5530, and the MOPSW instruction not being priviledged on the 68000, and the instruction restart after fault errors that Motorolla has had). Rather than tarring all products from a given manufacturer with a wide brush, it's much more useful to document what _does_ work, and list what _doesn't_ work only if you include very detailed information. Otherwise any experience, positive or negative, will not be repeatable by someone who goes out buying hardware. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-smp" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200011102149.OAA00930>