Author: Matt Taylor
Date: 09:39:34 02/24/03
Go up one level in this thread
On February 23, 2003 at 21:30:46, Robert Hyatt wrote: >On February 23, 2003 at 01:54:06, Jeremiah Penery wrote: > >>On February 23, 2003 at 00:55:00, Robert Hyatt wrote: >> >>>On February 22, 2003 at 19:40:44, Jeremiah Penery wrote: >>> >>>>On February 22, 2003 at 17:40:10, Robert Hyatt wrote: >>>> >>>>>Wouldn't argue. And I'd bet it would not fail a single time either. Until >>>>>you push the clock beyond what the engineers set the limit at. >>>> >>>>Tell that to the people who ever bought a P3 1.13GHz processor. :) >>> >>> >>>So? The original pentium had a horrible FP bug. That happens. Care to check >>>the AMD errata sheets? They do it to. As did even the Crays... >> >>So, the Intel engineers pushed the clock beyond the limit. > >No they didn't. They simply made an error in computing how fast it would >run. Just like the FP divide error where a table was copied but one entry >was omitted... That's an error in engineering, not in trying to push the >chip to the edge and beyond, IMHO. I'd bet they were _surprised_ when the >failure reports came in, and they found what was causing the problem quite >quickly, whether it was a slower gate or a longer path, or cross-coupling >that was unexpected, how knows. Even Hsu ran into some of that after he had >done multiple chess chips. I don't get too hyper about human errors. Meat >does make mistakes. :) > >> In essence, they >>overclocked it. You seem to think it's ok for Intel to do it, but that anyone >>else who does it is risking catastrophic meltdown every time they turn on their >>machine. > >If you think Intel produced the chips, then started cranking up the clock to >see how fast it would go, you are mistaken. How do they know _now_ how fast >the next generation will run??? The answers are found in electrical >engineering. And they can be wrong. Bridges _have_ fallen. Buildings _have_ >blown over. Planes have lost wings. Shuttles have lost tiles. And none of >it was caused by trial and error. Just a mistake here and there. Which is a >big difference between using the I-beam dimensions given in an engineering text >for a building X feet tall, but building the thing X+N feet tall and hoping it >works. That doesn't happen. Intel engineers know how fast a chip is going to run when they crank out the design. About 3 years ago my Dad mentioned to me that the Pentium 4 would clock to 5 GHz. I do not know where he heard about it, but I recently read the same thing in the Intel roadmap -- they will be near 5 GHz by the end of this year with the Pentium 4 core. I can't say anything regarding the 1.13 GHz Pentium 3 mistake, but many mistakes in other engineering disciplines have been marketting/management mistakes rather than engineering mistakes. -Matt
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