It has been very clear to us that Intel was not at all pleased with PAT-like tweaks being implemented on their i865PE chipsets by ABIT, ASUS, and AOpen to name a few. We have been hearing rumblings of Intel stopping this by shipping a new revision of the 865 chipset that is "un-PAT-able", says Kyle Bennett from [H]ardOCP. Nathan Glentworth from TweakNews apparantly was informed by MSI that Intel is currently changing i865 shipments to a new revision that has PAT hard locked. This means that vendors will not be able to enable it no matter what the the effort.
Intel consistently tried to state that PAT is a hardwired Canterwood feature. Either that is untrue to some degree or Springdale is able to utilize similar routines to back up the faster performance when using the modified BIOS releases. "I just got off the horn with MSI and is seems that the i865PE chipsets have dropped in price from Intel and from what my contact told me, they have hardware locked the PAT feature out of the second revision Springdale chipsets coming out of Intel's factory.", Glentworth told [H]ardOCP. Intel only reacted after Mr. Bennett got them on the hook by posting his observations. Here is the reply: We commit to the silicon meeting certain specs. We reserve the right to optimize our technology when it doesn't interfere with meeting those specs, and obviously we don't discuss all of our yield and factory changes that don't interfere with meeting our published specifications. If folks are overclocking silicon, they should never expect that they have guaranteed success with that. In fact they should allow for the opposite. If you ask me, you better buy your Springdale board now!
Intel consistently tried to state that PAT is a hardwired Canterwood feature. Either that is untrue to some degree or Springdale is able to utilize similar routines to back up the faster performance when using the modified BIOS releases. "I just got off the horn with MSI and is seems that the i865PE chipsets have dropped in price from Intel and from what my contact told me, they have hardware locked the PAT feature out of the second revision Springdale chipsets coming out of Intel's factory.", Glentworth told [H]ardOCP. Intel only reacted after Mr. Bennett got them on the hook by posting his observations. Here is the reply: We commit to the silicon meeting certain specs. We reserve the right to optimize our technology when it doesn't interfere with meeting those specs, and obviously we don't discuss all of our yield and factory changes that don't interfere with meeting our published specifications. If folks are overclocking silicon, they should never expect that they have guaranteed success with that. In fact they should allow for the opposite. If you ask me, you better buy your Springdale board now!
