On 24 Apr 2002, Christopher Stutts wrote: > It would be nice if someone actually had instructions on setting up a > chipset instead of just reverse engineering things.
There are two companies I have found that do not surround this type of thing with NDA, namely micron and the maker of galileo north bridge. Sad but true. One reason the PC business is such a mess is this NDA mania. Bad designs continue to be propagated because nobody knows better. Useless features continue to exist because nobody realizes that nobody uses them (just look at the PM features on some Intel northbridges. Then look at a Thinkpad and find ... it's all turned off). You add in fast DRAM and it runs slow because the bios is too lazy or dumb or cautious to run DRAM at speed -- or, the BIOS writers realize that so many DRAM modules lie about their speed that it is useless to run dram at CAS2 since you only get about 5% performance boost anyway. Many bioses on many mainboards don't run dram correctly, we have found. In many cases Linux can't ask the CPU or mainboard how hot it is because -- that's hidden (e.g. Compaq DS10). Cool features on AMD CPus can't be used because -- it's NDA. And we all go along, working with all this substandard hardware, since we don't know and can't know how to fix it. Here is a true story. We have about 128 Compaq SP-750s here. They cost something like $15,000 EACH. About half of them run PCI 10-15% slower than the other half. Turns out that the slow ones have the same Intel north bridge but the northbridges were made on a different fab line at a different time. So these machines, which all cost the same, have the same part number, have the same chipset, are supposedly identical to the last detail, are actually different machines. We have found that the BIOS sets bits in the northbridges differently -- probably to handle a bug in the chipset that is causing our PCI performance problem. Do you think any vendor will help with this? You're wrong in most cases -- certainly in the case of the big companies. That's why PC hardware is so bad, and why we're trying to escape building clusters based on PC hardware. We need more companies like http://cluster-labs.de. It's also why we need linuxbios, because otherwise we can't build working systems -- the vendor won't provide them. They are targeted at the guys who run Word. ron
