Category Archives: Intel

8237A DMA Page Fun

Posted on March 28, 2021 by Michal Necasek

The other day I was trying to fill a couple of gaps in my understanding of the Intel 8237A DMA controller documentation. I wrote a small testcase that performed a dummy transfer and modified the base address and count registers … Continue reading →

Posted in Intel, PC architecture, PC history | 5 Comments

Nehalem and 4 Gbit DDR3

Posted on February 5, 2021 by Michal Necasek

While discussing Intel desktops with DDR2 memory using 2 Gbit technology (4 GB UDIMMs), the question of Intel’s next generation and 4 Gbit DDR3 (8 GB UDIMMs) came up. It’s more or less the next iteration of exactly the same … Continue reading →

Posted in Intel, PC hardware, PC history | 10 Comments

The Phantom Intel GM47 Chipset

Posted on February 2, 2021 by Michal Necasek

I spent a bit of time recently putting together technical documentation for Intel’s 4-series chipsets, partly motivated by research into Intel’s support of 4 GB DDR2 memory modules, partly driven by idle curiosity about one of Intel’s many hyped up … Continue reading →

Posted in Intel, PC history, PC press | 7 Comments

Seek and Ye Shall Find…

Posted on January 20, 2021 by Michal Necasek

…in the strangest places! Lately I’ve been digging up marketing materials related to Intel’s desktop boards (I’ve long been toying with the idea of writing up a brief history of the circa 10 years of Intel Extreme Series boards). There … Continue reading →

Posted in Archiving, Intel, PC hardware, PC history | 2 Comments

Return to Stormville

Posted on September 29, 2020 by Michal Necasek

A while ago I griped about a strangely ill-behaved Intel DX79SR Stormville board. To recap, the board simply refused to take any memory in the 4th memory channel. Since then, there have been very interesting new development in the story. … Continue reading →

Posted in Bugs, Intel, PC hardware | 3 Comments

How Old Is OMF?

Posted on July 9, 2020 by Michal Necasek

The Object Module Format (OMF), used by most DOS development tools, and eventually displaced by COFF/ELF in the 32-bit world, is quite old. It is a somewhat strange format because of its age, and it is quite complex, both because … Continue reading →

Posted in Development, Intel, Microsoft, PC history, x86 | 8 Comments

Those Win9x Crashes on Fast Machines…

Posted on June 2, 2020 by Michal Necasek

It is well known that Win9x variants prior to Windows 98 have a tendency to crash on fast CPUs. The definition of “fast” is of course fuzzy but the problems were known to occur on AMD K6-2 processors running at … Continue reading →

Posted in AMD, Bugs, Intel, Microsoft | 24 Comments

Memory Trouble in Stormville

Posted on April 18, 2020 by Michal Necasek

The OS/2 Museum recently acquired a genuine Intel DX79SR (Stormville) board. Together with its close siblings DX79SI (Siler) and DX79TO (Thorsby), these were the last “great” Intel motherboards, supporting the big LGA 2011 socket for the Sandy Bridge E platform—but … Continue reading →

Posted in Bugs, Intel, PC hardware, PC history | 14 Comments

The Cape Cod Disaster

Posted on December 16, 2019 by Michal Necasek

Here’s a motherboard Intel very quickly wanted to forget about: It’s the Intel CC820—or Cape Cod—desktop board, a product that was late to market (not unusual) and within a few months, the subject of a recall (quite unusual). As the … Continue reading →

Posted in Bugs, Intel, PC hardware, PC history, Pentium III, RDRAM | 45 Comments

More on NX Insanity

Posted on November 29, 2019 by Michal Necasek

This article was supposed to be published about two years ago but got forgotten and ignored until now. It’s not the only such article. Perhaps it will start a new “better published late than never” series. After looking more closely … Continue reading →

Posted in AMD, Bugs, Intel, Microsoft | 13 Comments