Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[dacaw]

Why pentium overtook Athlon

I was reading the botes on the Virtualdub site www.virtualdub.org and I see that the author's experience is similar to mine. This leads me to conclude that a major reason for intel's success with its pentium4 was thanks to Via's buggy Athlon chipset.

I had a Gigabyte motherboard with an XP1800 and the 686B southbridge, used mainly for video work. While it was running win98 it was perfectly stable. Then I upgraded it to Win2000. In a couple of months I had disk corruption on the system drive about 5 times. Four times I had to reload the whole OS and application programs. I researched the topic and found attempts by a George Breese to software fix the chipset. In the end his project was adandoned. I tried every combo of drivers, via and microsoft, all to no avail. The failure only happened with large files

Eventually I dumped the motherboard (in the trash!) and bought an Nvidia-based board. All works fine now.

Via knew about this problem but tried to hide it. It cost AMD a lot of business I'm sure and damaged their reputation. It was just about this time that intel ran away with the market.

If I had persevered less I might have blamed the Athlon. Its a sorry tale of Via, thank god for Nvidia.