Date: Fri, 10 Nov 2000 17:50:57 -0600 (CST) From: Chris Dillon <cdillon@wolves.k12.mo.us> To: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> Cc: Jeremiah Gowdy <jgowdy@home.com>, KT Sin <ktsin@acm.org>, freebsd-smp@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: via chipset and SMP Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0011101726020.21026-100000@mail.wolves.k12.mo.us> In-Reply-To: <200011102149.OAA00930@usr08.primenet.com>
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On Fri, 10 Nov 2000, Terry Lambert wrote: > [ ... 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. Apparently I've never used more than one busmaster device at a time (not a common situation, I presume). Could you elaborate on that a bit? Are more than one busmaster device capable of being present in the system, just not in use concurrently? And which chipsets from Intel are doing this correctly now? > 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). My general feeling about the companies I've mentioned mostly applies to fairly recent generations of systems, Pentium and above. I have used many 286, 386, and 486 systems with no-name chipsets and only sometimes had compatibility problems. Things were much simpler back then. :-) > 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. Yeah, I'm aware of the bugs in those chipsets, as well as many others that Intel has made (except for the RZ1000 bug... never heard of that one). I submit, though, that in general Intel has fewer problems than the others I've mentioned. Stuff like the F00F and floating-point bugs are strictly processor-related, anyway, not chipset. Intel certainly has its share of chipset bugs, even recently (the i820+MTH is a good example, but that was a bad electrical engineering decision on their part, not a hardware or software compatibility problem). > 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). Most definately, but we're moving away from the "support chipset" area of discussion. :-) > 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. I based it entirely on my own experience, which in general has not been good from said companies. A lot of it is based on "I put the card in this VIA-based system, it doesn't work. I put it in this Intel-based system, and it works fine. Grunt. Snort." Granted, I'm not using the newer Intel stuff -- the latest chipset from Intel that we're using around here is still the good old i440BX, though I would probably trust the recent i815 as much. I find it rather funny, though, that with so much experience riding on the shoulders of all of these companies, that they can have something working in one chipset and then break it in the next one. It seems to be getting better in some areas and worse in others. I'm waiting to see wether AMD's 760 will prove to be reliable and compatible, at which point we'll start buying Athlon processors and motherboards using that chipset. Since I can't buy any Athlons right now without putting them on a board with a VIA chipset (the AMD 750 isn't an option), we don't use them. -- Chris Dillon - cdillon@wolves.k12.mo.us - cdillon@inter-linc.net FreeBSD: The fastest and most stable server OS on the planet. For IA32 and Alpha architectures. IA64 and PowerPC under development. http://www.freebsd.org To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-smp" in the body of the message
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