Strange things going on with 4.8

[Don Lewis]

On 16 Aug, Kevin Oberman wrote:
>> Date: Fri, 15 Aug 2003 15:48:02 -0700 (PDT)
>> From: Don Lewis <truckman at FreeBSD.org>
>> Sender: owner-freebsd-stable at freebsd.org
>> 
>> On 11 Aug, Robert Gray wrote:
>> > Until I hear otherwise, I'll continue to spend extra
>> > for the redundant, error-checking memories.
>> 
>> Me too, but I've found there is a distinct lack of ECC capable
>> motherboards for the newer versions of the AMD Athlon XP.
> 
> OK. Are yo aware of ANY Athlon XP (Socket A) mobo that supports ECC
> PC2700 or PC3200 memory with a 333 or 400 MHz FSB? I have been looking
> and have found ZIP! I find if hard to believe that there is not enough
> market, but I am starting to wonder.

None that I'm aware of.  The documentation for the older VIA chipsets
claimed that they supported of ECC, but I never found a motherboard with
one of these chipsets that supported ECC, and the last time I checked,
the chipset documentation was only available to VIA's "parters" under
NDA.  The only Athlon motherboards that I found with ECC support were
the AMD 760 and 761, and those don't support anything faster than
PC2100.

I've been wanting to drop a note to AMD's marketing department that they
should lean on their chipset and motherboard suppliers to get them to
support ECC RAM if they want to be taken seriously in a somewhat higher
end market that cares about data integrity.  I suspect that AMD wants to
migrate this part of the market to the Hammer.