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(11th April 1996) A collective sigh of relief has emerged from the
PowerPC camp as Bull has taken delivery of its first 200MHZ 'Red
October' PowerPC 620s and has found them to be relatively bug-free. Our
sister publication, Unigram.x reports Bull found three substantial bugs,
at least one of them in the area of reset behaviour, but pronounced that
this is par for the course with an initial release. Somerset has
apparently fixed the faults in a 1.1 tape-out which should see the next
version of the chip delivered by Motorola this month, ahead of the June
schedule.
We haven't been able to get any performance figures out of the partners,
but US PC Week quotes Bull sources as saying that the Bull has found
that the 620 "performs 64 percent better in servers than the fastest
[Pentium] Pro with the largest cache available". Bull, apparently was
using 4MByte L2 cache for its experimental lash-ups which no-doubt
account for the high rating; still given that the original 620 specs
alow it to support up to 128MB cache, there's plenty of lee-way for
performance improvements yet.
The problems with the initial shipments were not so severe as to stop
Bull from building them into prototype machines