Monday, December 10, 2007

Scott Wasson @ Tech Report: a mistake

We have been talking about the "Tech Report" coverage of the K10 TLB error.

Scott Wasson published an article where he explains that he made a mistake

I wrote more than once in our coverage of the erratum that AMD had initially suggested the problem didn't affect lower clock speeds of the Phenom. Turns out that's not the case. Here is the text of my notes, verbatim:
TLB problem w/virtualization
2.4 will have the complete fix
Have to enable something in the BIOS for the 2.2 and 2.3
Can degrade perf a little bit
[...]
I think I may have read this incorrect information online somewhere
I also followed internet sources that said that AMD explained that the Phenom 2.4 GHz had a bug and that's why it was retired from the market, but that the same bug wasn't present in the slower versions. The Inquirer may have been the culprit,
This problem was found during speed-binning the B2 revision processors, and this was the cause for the Phenom FX 3.0 GHz delay. It turns out that some CPUs running at 2.4 GHz or above in some benchmarking combinations, while all four cores are running at 100% load, can cause a system freeze.
[...]
9500 (2.2 GHz) and 9600 (2.3 GHz) parts are unaffected by the errata [ my emphasis ] Some 9500/9600 parts may even be overclocked to 2.6, 2.8, 2.9, 3.0 GHz and they will have no problems whatsoever, while some will have this error.

I thought it was important to correct this at the "new-post" level rather than merely an update to old articles or a comment. This emphasizes the importance of having the sources properly linked to, you can backtrack the origin of your assertions.

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

Chicagrafo,

Please see http://techreport.com/discussions.x/13778