On Fri, 22 Oct 2004, Don Elwell wrote:
I burned a ton of time on this a while ago but got nowhere. It would seem that Intel provides only partial documentation for their chipsets on their web site. I discovered that there are hidden/undocumented registers used in the DDR SDRAM setup (there are probably others). I also tried in vain to get a contact there but again came up empty handed. In the end, we ended up going with a different chipset manufacturer.
I hear this story about Intel a lot. Every intel port we've done has had an issue of undocumented behavior, except I think for the 440BX.
Other vendors's parts do also have undocumented behavior but the level of helpfulness at some of them is better than Intel. I keep hoping things will get better with Intel because I do like their parts and the fact that once a part comes out it's stable for a long time.
Ron, where did you get information for your 855 port in v2? Is it broken for the "hidden registers" reason?
I got the info from the public web site, and yes I'm hung up due to lack of real info. The question is, is it worth the effort to do this pentium-M with such a lack of vendor support, or is time better spent with vendors who want to work with you (AMD, IBM, others)? For now I'm putting my time into vendors who want to play nice. Pentium-M is turned off for a while.
ron