Some Altair questions, if I may..

On 8/27/2014 8:20 AM, William Donzelli wrote: Intel used the Deathstar, which was a semicircle of HP 16700 frames loaded with 4m deep capable cards. I don't know how many channels they had, but I know they instrumented the FSB and graphics. This was in the time of the Timna, which was to be a single SOC with graphics just after the P3 Coppermine turn. The Coppermine was about the last S1 form factor product before they transitioned back into the original pin type packaging away from BGA's on circuit boards for reference. The Timna was killed off, not sure why. The 16700's are already sometimes in the $100 range with the newer logic analyzers out in the field now. We at Arium had a trace product up to the S2 and S1 days which used an Arium ML4400 analyzer with special cards built by another company to capture the bus traffic. That was the last trace product for Intel that we did. We transitioned to run control only like everyone else and left the tracing to others. I think the monster that HP made for the Itanium was the last trace they did for intel. There is a preprocessor module that shows up on the market w/o the adapter to go under the processor all the time. Useless w/o the adapter, but people look at the original cost from HP for it and price the things at ridiculous amounts. They are almost always for sale percentage of the original balance sheet value. HP made so few of these that they were just incredibly expensive. We at Arium did the run control for Itanium for HP and interacted with their logic analyzers to do triggering and also could read the trace into our debugger for annotated instruction level trace. Jim