Intel used to be a rather conservative player on the core-logic market three or four years ago: some blamed the company for not utilising the AGP 4x and PC133 SDRAM in late 1999 and turned to VIA. The times has changed and Intel implements the new features into its chipsets only a bit later than its rivals from Taiwan. As a result of such continuous race, a lot of problems with the actual hardware usually occur since companies may launch some technologies that are not enough mature and may contain some incompatibilities or other issues. That what has apparently happened to E7505 core-logic intended for 2-way workstations and entry-level servers. As it appeared, there are a couple of problems with AGP in the mentioned chipset. Although they do not seem to impact any other functions of the chipset, the fact that the there are some AGP related issues with Intel’s workstation chipset is really strange because we have never seen something of this kind before.

According to this SpecUpdate, during simulation studies, it was determined that the AGP signals were not meeting the tVAL(min) of 1 ns. The bug is resolved by board workaround, hence, end-users should not experience any problems with the actual mainboards. Another issue with E7505 MCH concerns AGP prefetch cache. System hangs can occur during AGP transactions when the AGP Prefetcher is enabled. One should disable AGP prefetch cache by clearing bit 0 of AGP Miscellaneous Register (Device 1 Function 0 Offset A0–A3h). Issue resolves by BIOS workaround. Furthermore, another SpecUpdate claims that the core voltage of the E7505 MCH is increased from 1.2V to 1.3V, not a big change in specifications, but we see that the chipset is being finalised after the actual release.

There are some suspicions that the same problems may occur with the E7205 chipset that is far more popular and is planned to be used not only in workstations, but even in high-end desktop computers. I want to point that these are only my personal suspicions, not officially confirmed fact.

To sum up, if you have an E7205 or E7505 powered mainboard – watch for the latest BIOS to be installed.