By Timothy Prickett Morgan
Intel Corp, which has had its share of bad luck lately with the Camino Rambus memory chipset, has another problem, and this time it is in the Pentium III Xeon processors when they are used in conjunction with the new eight-way Profusion chipset. The Pentium III Xeon bug rears its ugly head only when the 550MHz processors are equipped with either 512Kb or 1Mb of L2 cache memory. If customers put the pedal to the metal on the Profusion servers built using Intel’s Saber OCPRF100 motherboards, then they get the ‘blue screen of death’.
The problem does not crop up in Saber motherboards that use Pentium III Xeons equipped with 2Mb of L2 cache memory. Nor does the Pentium III Xeon bug affect other Profusion motherboards not made by Intel – particularly those made by Intel’s Profusion development partner, Compaq – regardless of the amount of L2 cache on them. Customers are being advised to buy Profusion servers with the 2Mb L2 cache. The only problem is that the Pentium III Xeon with 2Mb of L2 cache costs just under $4,000 wholesale from Intel, roughly twice as much as the one with 1Mb of L2 cache and four times as much as the one with only 512Mb of L2 cache. The problem is apparently a design flaw in the chip that was fixed in the 2Mb version, which is a newer design, but which was inadvertently left uncorrected in the 512Kb and 1Mb versions, which are older designs. Although Intel hasn’t publicly admitted to this yet, there is speculation that the problem will also affect four-way servers using the Profusion chipset, too. Intel says that it hopes to have a workaround for the problem in a few weeks.
