AMI continues Pentium Pro motherboard magic with Merlin; AMI's Merlin first production motherboard to offer on-board USB connectors.ATLANTA--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 10, 1996--American Megatrends Inc. (AMI) announced Friday that its Merlin Pentium(R) Pro 180/200MHz motherboard with on-board USB USB in full Universal Serial Bus Type of serial bus that allows peripheral devices (disks, modems, printers, digitizers, data gloves, etc.) to be easily connected to a computer. connectors, will be available later this month. Superior features that differentiate Merlin from all other Pentium(R) Pro motherboards currently available include on-board Universal Serial Bus See USB. (hardware, standard) Universal Serial Bus - (USB) An external peripheral interface standard for communication between a computer and external peripherals over an inexpensive cable using biserial transmission. (USB) connectors, optional ROM socket, CPU CPU in full central processing unit Principal component of a digital computer, composed of a control unit, an instruction-decoding unit, and an arithmetic-logic unit. overheat alarm, 3.3V voltage regulator, and a system watchdog timer. The integrated USB connectors are implemented through two four-pin connectors integrated onto the motherboard. Merlin will be the first production AMI motherboard to ship with USB connectors on-board, making this advanced future technology available now. Another unique feature that Merlin offers is an optional ROM socket. This will allow customers to supply bigger and more complex bootable code. The optional ROM has flexible control support, so that the customer can have control during BIOS boot time. In addition, the control of the optional ROM can be passed from a booted operating system. The 32KB optional ROM socket supports flash or EEPROM (Electrically Erasable Programmable ROM) A rewritable memory chip that holds its content without power. Although EEPROMs spawned flash memory, EEPROMs are byte addressable at the write level, whereas flash chips must erase a block of bytes before rewriting. through a standard 32 pin socket, that is Plug & Play compatible. Three other features that set Merlin apart are the CPU overheat alarm, a 3.3V voltage regulator, and the system watchdog timer. The CPU overheat alarm is essentially an audible alarm that alerts the user when the CPU heatsink fan has failed or stopped working. This safety feature will alert the user and prevent any heat damage to the motherboard or CPU. The 3.3V voltage regulator will ensure that the Merlin will be upgradable well into the future. Simply by inserting a regulator module, the user will be able to upgrade to faster Pentium(R) processors when they become available. Merlin has an integrated system watchdog timer, which automatically reboots the computer if the computer locks up or freezes. Merlin can support up to 512MB of on-board memory using x32 or x36 SIMMs. ECC (1) (Error-Correcting Code) A type of memory that corrects errors on the fly. See ECC memory. (2) (Elliptic Curve Cryptography) A public key cryptography method that provides fast decryption and digital signature processing. , memory parity, EDO Edo: see Tokyo, Japan. Fast Page, Burst EDO memory are all supported. AMI is using the new Intel Natoma(R) chipset on the Merlin motherboard. Some of the other features available on Merlin are four PCI bus master slots, four ISA slots, integrated I/O (including serial, EPP/ECP parallel, floppy, and PS/2 mouse), and an integrated dual channel enhanced PCI (1) (Payment Card Industry) See PCI DSS. (2) (Peripheral Component Interconnect) The most widely used I/O bus (peripheral bus). IDE with PIO mode 4 support. Founded in 1985, Atlanta-based American Megatrends Inc., in over half the computers in the world with its world-famous AMIBIOS AMIBIOS American Megatrends, Incorporated, Basic Input/Output System , also produces a variety of software and hardware solutions including utility software, keyboard controllers, PCMCIA (Personal Computer Memory Card International Association, San Jose, CA, www.pcmcia.org) An international standards body and trade association that was founded in 1989 to establish a standard for connecting peripherals to portable computers. PCMCIA created the PC Card. See PC Card. software, motherboards, and RAID controllers. AMI can be reached at 800/828-9264 or 770/246-8600 and on the World Wide Web at http://www.megatrends.com. CONTACT: American Megatrends Inc., Atlanta Joe P. Leader, 770/246-8600; 800/828-9264; fax: 770/246-8790 E-mail: JoeLeader@American.Megatrends.Com |
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