On Fri, 2002-05-10 at 04:22, civileme wrote:

> Ummm, I would never be one to single out VIA.  There have been real bugs 
> in _ALL_ the chipsets around.  How much of those you see depends on 
> where in the arms race you pick out a kernel, in most cases.
> 
> The VIA 686B southbridge had a problem which caused cross-channel IDE 
> DMAs to provide _massive_ corruption on transfers of more than 100Mb, 
> but a workaround was found and put into the kernel.
> 
> The KT266A and current ALi Chipsets have broken clocks.  Under heavy 
> loads, spurious clock pulses can play hell with UDMA transfers.  A 
> temporary fix would be to depress the priority of the clock interrupt 
> using irqtune, but then dispatching would be adversely affected.  Yes, 
> under certain circumstances (software RAID with journaling filesystem 
> and heavy load) these chipsets with the broken clocks show data 
> corruption, really.
> 
> SiS and Intel are not free of problems either.  Just right now those are 
> covered by kernel workarounds, mostly.  Some workarounds have to be 
> invoked, separately, as is the case with K6-2 and SiS 530 chipsets which 
> perform much better under "nopentium" installs and boots.  There is a 
> serious break for agpgart for some i815 implementations...  You pays 
> your money and you takes your chances; when has it been different?
> 
> I used to hate certain brands of Motherboard and love others, but while 
> I was busy avoiding the ones I hated, some of them became good and 
> reliable, while those I thought were great acquired new owners who were 
> determined to cash in on the reputations of the previous owners's 
> fanaticism for quality.

Bingo!  That's my experience exactly.  While I stagnated in Tyan mobos,
the other ones advanced, innovated, and evolved.  Fortunately, I did
keep looking around and listening to the tech sites, and as a result I'm
currently in a sweet spot.

> There are no constants in this industry.  Things are moving too fast. 
>  Knowledge overall is doubling every 6 years or less, and in the 
> computing industry it is quite a bit faster than that (remember 
> processor speed is doubling every 18 months, for example).  The people 
> in good odor today may smell of the sewer tomorrow, depending on whether 
> the techs or the marketeers are in control of their company.

Seconded, in a big way. :)

 
> Civileme
> 

LX

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