Athlon + PC133: no ECC?

[Douglas Eadline]

On Wed, 7 Jun 2000, Josip Loncaric wrote:

> Athlons do well on floating point, so we've been looking at building
> some Athlon nodes for our cluster, using PC133 memory of course.  This
> requires VIA's KX133 chipset (now) or KT133 (near future) or AMD's 760
> (more distant future).
> 
> On June 5th, AMD finally released Athlons with full speed on-chip cache
> (see http://www.amd.com/news/prodpr/20108.html).  These will come in
> OEM 'Slot A' packaging for the existing Athlon motherboards (e.g. those
> based on VIA's KX133 chipset), but 'Socket A' packaging will be
> preferable.  The 'Socket A' Athlons will require the KT133 chipset from
> VIA (see http://www.viatech.com/news/00kt133launch.htm), at least until
> AMD gets its 760 chipset out the door.
>

As I understand it, the "new Athlons" will only be available
as socket A parts to the general public. Slot A parts will
only be sold to OEMs and will not work with with the KX chipset
in any case.
(This was my understanding anyway, perhaps I am wrong)
 
-snip-
> 
> If ECC is indeed unavailable on VIA's chipsets, and AMD's 760 chipset
> remains unavailable, things do not look so good for Athlons at our end.
> How concerned should we be about the lack of ECC with fast Athlons? 
> This issue may even force us to go back to Pentiums.  BTW, some
> Linux compatibility issues with Athlons were also reported, such as the
> MTRR setup and even DMA problems with certain ATA drives, but unlike the
> ECC situation, those compatibility issues are presumably resolvable in
> software.

ECC is nice. We are integrating ECC capabilities in our monitoring
tool to detect possible problems.

Doug

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