Coppermine Goes Dry

A glitch has been found in Intel's new "Coppermine" chips which can prevent a computer from booting when the power button is pressed. The user will have to press the power button again in order for the computer to boot up. Although no cases have been reported by end users yet, Dell completely stopped shipping its corporate desktop system Optiplex GX110 earlier today. The online catalog to view the series has been disabled on Dell's Web site as well.

The new chip made by Intel, which has been shipping since the end of October, is built on new technology making it 0.18 microns instead of the larger chips in the past. This new technology has allowed chip speeds of up to 733MHz in the Intel Coppermine line, and 750MHz (released Monday) in the AMD Athlon line. This year alone, chip speeds have jumped from 450MHz to the latest from AMD, mainly in the last few months. Coppermine chips range from 500MHz to 733MHz and have been shipped by most major computer manufacturers.

This means that presently, with the release of the Athlon 750MHz, AMD now controls the high end chip market. As stated in an article earlier this week on BetaNews, the release of this chip was pushed up to now to directly compete with Intel Coppermine chips. Now that this glitch has been found, Intel MUST race to correct the problem so that AMD does not gain too great of a lead in the race to the 1GHz line which is slated for late next year.

eFront will keep you posted on the coming events dealing with the Coppermine and the Athlon processors.