Sharky Extreme heeft een interview gepost met een mannetje van Creative. Er zit behoorlijk goede info tussen, o.a. over de clock speeds van de TNT2:
In the high-end product segment, where performance is a premium, we design our boards for speed first and cost second. We want to provide headroom for end users that like to fiddle with the clock, although we don't encourage overclocking. So our high-end boards are designed with plenty of margin for overclocking. That is an engineering decision. So if the memory clock of the chip were warranted to 183MHz, we would lay the board out for much faster operation. These kinds of layouts tend to cost more (including fans), but some customers will pay for this added benefit.The second issue is qualification of components. A high-end board may be designed for 230MHz operation, but in selecting memory then you may have to set a standard operating frequency of less than 230 MHz because of variations in the memory supply. Every component, the board, the chip, the memory has process variation. So memory spec'ed for 183MHz may vary in speeds from say 183 to 195, for example. Moreover, the memory may vary from vendor to vendor and from lot to lot. That means memory from company X MAY, on average, run faster than memory from company Y, more importantly, one lot or batch of memory from company X may vary from another batch of memory from company X. The reason why the memory vendor provides a spec is to ASSURE that 100% of the product operates at the stated frequency. Some percentage will ALWAYS run faster, but which parts will run faster and how much faster is a Lottery. When a vendor finds a good portion of the parts running faster, they create a new speed bin.
Erg goede soep en rechtstreek van de fabrikant zelf. Als je geïnteresseerd bent in de TNT2 zou ik het absoluut ff doorlezen. Uit het interview blijkt trouwens ook duidelijk dat Creative absoluut niets meer moet hebben van 3Dfx.
