Micro Managers Say No to Faulty 486 Chips
 
Microbytes Daily News Service
Copyright (c) 1989, McGraw-Hill, Inc.
The bugs that Intel recently discovered in its 80486 CPU are
not good news to microcomputer managers at large corporations.
And the best solution, according to one group of managers, would
be to replace all the problem chips before they ever get into
users' hands.
 
That group is the 486 Standardization Committee, sponsored by the
Microcomputer Managers Association. A common problem of micro
managers has been the many incompatible varieties of memory
upgrades, disk controllers, and other add-ins on 386-based PCs.
The 486 Committee was formed in 1988 with the hope of helping to
standardize add-in cards and peripherals for 486-based PCs.
Unfortunately, with the continued buggy versions of the 486
shipped to manufacturers, the micro managers face the prospect of
trying to standardize the 486 chip itself.
 
At a meeting last week at Comdex in Las Vegas, the committee
called on manufacturers not to ship 486-based machines with buggy
chips, even with the promise that the buggy chips would
eventually be replaced with good chips.
 
The committee is also considering other compatibility problems
and looking for ways to avoid the mishmash micro managers faced
with the 386. Among topics they're working on: very-high-density
floppy-disk drives (including drives from Brier, Insite, Pacific
Rim Systems, Panasonic, and Toshiba) and compatibility among
Micro Channel and EISA cards from different manufacturers.
 
We hope the 486 Standardization Committee has some impact on the
companies making 486-based PCs, especially on the buggy-486
issue. When word arrived that the chips had problems, IBM
immediately stopped shipping its 486 Power Platform upgrade, and
some other companies followed suit. But still others, including
ALR, said they'd offer their users the option of accepting buggy
systems "if they feel that the application they're using it for
won't be hampered by this bug."
 
As we said when first reporting on the bugs, it's bad news for
the 486 -- and these micro managers agree. Having hundreds or
thousands of bad 486 chips in computers will cast a cloud over
all 486-based machines, and that's a bad trade for getting those
new systems out the door a month or two sooner. Intel says good
chips will start shipping at the end of this month.
 
In the meantime, since Intel didn't stop shipping the bad chips,
PC makers should insist on getting good chips before they
dispatch their systems, and customers should insist on the real
thing before they begin buying 486-based computers.
 
Contact: 486 Standardization Committee, Attn: Brian Livingston,
50 West 34th St., 23rd Floor, New York, NY 10001.
 
                              --- BYTEWweek Staff
 
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