More details are emerging on Intel's woes with the ill-fated Camino chipset. Electronic Buyers' News in the US reports that the timing problem with the Rambus RIMMs stems from the fact that some of the motherboard traces are up to 10cm in length, causing timing-related signal integrity problems. If this is indeed the cause of the problem, all existing Camino motherboards will have to be scrapped. It is not known if the trace lengths to the second memory slot are also long enough to cause problems. One extremely high tech kludge to get around the problem is reported to be the fitting of a cap over the offending third memory slot. This would prevent OEMs and end users from fitting additional RIMMs, but, as reported here yesterday, this would mean a maximum of 512MB of RAM for all i820 based systems - not nearly enough for the kind of demanding applications the chipset was designed to handle. One Intel insider who asked not to be named summed up the problem succinctly: "You'd have though someone would have thought to test a motherboard fully-populated with RIMMs. What a bunch of Muppets." ®