On Wed, 29 Aug 2001, Michael C. Wu wrote:

Companies in Taiwan manufacture the motherboards. They do not need to reverse engineer them when they A) designed it, or B) have documentation and beta CPU's for design.

Those are high-cost manufacturers who produce business-grade equipment. When it gets to consumer-grade stuff, the margins are so low that those shops which play in that area cannot afford their own designs. And don't forget mainland China, Indonesia, and other places where a lot of "no-brand" stuff is produced. Actually looking inside PCs is often quite enlightening. I'm quite amazed how most of cheapo stuff manages to work at all. Like, missing or leaky capacitors, plain conductors instead of inductance coils, peeling PCBs, missing ground wires, unevenly soldered connections, overclocked CPUs and DRAMs. PCs are very poorly designed, too. If not for Billy's flaky software, that would be quite evident. Anyway, this is drifting off-topic. My point was that CO-grade, non-stop equipment has very different design requirements from PCs. So is military stuff, but somehow nobody complains that MIL-spec equipment is so expensive and so few-generations-behind. --vadim