On  7 May 98 at 19:03, Michael A. Wosnick wrote:

> According to my source, there is a little known limitation with current
> Pentium II processors that allow them to recognize or address a limit of
> 64Megs of RAM. This despite the fact that many high-end Pentium IIs are
> advertised as being expandable in the RAM department to much higher
> amounts. Could this be a case where the Pentium II motherboards will accept
> higher amounts of RAM, but somehow the excess over 64Megs is not recognized
> by the CPU?
>
> Frankly, this sounds screwy to me. I find it hard to buy that a top of the
> line Pentium II based computer can only really use 64Megs of RAM.
> Certainly I have never heard this before today.

  This is a limitation in the Intel 430VX and 430TX *Pentium* (NOT
PII!) chipsets.  There are Pentium chipsets that don't have this
limitation, but Intel wants to move customers to PII, so they've
discontinued the 430HX chipset which wasn't so limited.  [There are
several non-Intel chipsets which avoid this problem....]
  The limitation doesn't prevent recognition or addressing, just
caching.  Many benchmarks show this as a drop in system performance
of about 5%, but in a few cases the impact can be as much as 15%.

> According to this source of mine, there is a new flavour of Pentium II
> coming out soon that will eliminate this limitation, and he predicted that
> the prices of current Pentium IIs will plummet as a result.

  The "new flavour of Pentium II" is aimed at low-cost applications,
and so is more likely to "prop up" prices for existing PII versions
than to drive their prices down.

> Can anyone shed light on this? I am not gullible, and I don't believe
> everything I hear, but, as I said this comes from someone who I used to
> think was very knowledgeable. Is he???

  Your friend has probabvly heard several true things, but he has
misunderstood and conflated them almost beyond recognition.

David G