Son of Zeus
10-25-2000, 01:44 PM
Dan Neel of InfoWorld.com warns that AMD & Intel’s faster chips now outrace their testing equipment, which could result in devastating multi-error pileups. Will this mean the end of the Gigahertz Race as we know it & the ruination of my still tentatively planned new system?
The full story can be found on PC World at: http://www.pcworld.com/news/article.asp?aid=32944
Two specific problems plague the hardware components in high-speed processors, according to Jones. The first he calls a "race condition," where data moving at vastly different speeds within the processor fail to accurately synchronize, causing a miscalculation. This condition can cause "addition to get there faster than multiplication, for example, mixing up the logic and yielding a bad result," Jones says.
Second, "there are chip arbiters that decide when and where things occur on a branch instruction inside the processor, but when you speed them up, things that occur in a certain order in the slower surrounding architecture can wind up being in reverse order, also bringing a bad result," Jones says.
Cheers.......Son of Zeus.
The full story can be found on PC World at: http://www.pcworld.com/news/article.asp?aid=32944
Two specific problems plague the hardware components in high-speed processors, according to Jones. The first he calls a "race condition," where data moving at vastly different speeds within the processor fail to accurately synchronize, causing a miscalculation. This condition can cause "addition to get there faster than multiplication, for example, mixing up the logic and yielding a bad result," Jones says.
Second, "there are chip arbiters that decide when and where things occur on a branch instruction inside the processor, but when you speed them up, things that occur in a certain order in the slower surrounding architecture can wind up being in reverse order, also bringing a bad result," Jones says.
Cheers.......Son of Zeus.