[Fair Use: For Educational and Research Purposes Only]

Glitch Delays Gateway's Latest 1-GHz PCs

(06/30/00, 7:55 p.m. ET) By Mark Hachman, TechWeb News

A glitch in Gateway's new 1-GHz PCs has prompted the vendor to ship the systems with a different AMD chip than originally planned.

Gateway (stock: GTW) is replacing the "Thunderbird" processor with older "classic" Athlon-based models until it can isolate the problem, which it discovered internally on June 12. The company said it believes the trouble lies in the motherboard or in the power supply, but has not determined which, or whether, either component is at fault.

Gateway hopes to find and resolve the problem in time for shipments to resume by July 10, the spokesman said.

The glitch appears to be a relatively minor one that affects only Gateway's 1-GHz Select "deluxe" consumer PC, according to a spokesman for the San Diego-based company. Potential errors include unexpected system lockups, which is the reason Gateway switched back to the 1-GHz Athlons.

Gateway declined to say how many systems shipped before the glitch was discovered.

"We feel we caught the overwhelming majority" of defective systems before they shipped," the spokesman said. "There's no evidence that systems in the field are causing problems."

He added that the powerful 1-GHz PCs represent a relatively small portion of the Select product line.

Gateway chief financial officer John Todd in late May said the company uses custom-designed Athlon motherboards from Jabil Circuit (stock: JBL), St. Petersburg, Fla.

A spokeswoman for Advanced Micro Devices in Austin, Texas, said the error is specific to Gateway systems, not the AMD (stock: AMD) microprocessor lineup or its complementary chip sets.

The new Thunderbird chip -- which AMD refers to as an "Athlon processor with new performance-enhancing cache memory" -- contains 256 Kbytes of on-chip cache. The classic Athlon processor lacks this type of cache.

AMD's website said the new on-chip cache boosts system performance over the old Athlon by 2 percent to 13 percent, depending upon the application. However, AMD's tests were run using a prototype motherboard that's not scheduled to be available until the second half of the year.

For now, Gateway customers interested in the Thunderbird's performance must either wait for problems with the 1-GHz-based models to be solved or buy an available 900-MHz Select

http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB20000630S0011

-- (Dee360Degree@aol.com), July 01, 2000