[rasz]

>No, Irongate was very much internally developed by AMD.

My confusion comes from wiki entry for AMD-640 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_chipsets#AMD-xxx I assumed 741 was further development based on 640.

> AMD was well aware of the "sketchy" nature of ALI/VLI/ULI/SiS

From my limited experience in practice AMD-751 was more problematic than KT133/133A. Those were still the times when hardware reviews had sections dedicated to "Stability". For example https://www.anandtech.com/show/718/5

"Even when running the DDR SDRAM at CAS 2 settings, the system did not crash once within 24 hours of our stress tests. We continued to run the stability tests and finally the first crash occurred after 34 hours of operation. Considering that this is FIC's first try at a DDR board we were very impressed with the stability of the AD11."

Personally I dont remember many vendors sticking with AMD chipsets after switch to Socket A, at least in Europe it was all VIA with some ALI/SIS. As for price its all on AMD, nobody forced them to manufacture at Dresden. If chipset was so strategic AMD should have sold it with minimal/no margin. The way I see it AMD was just seeding the market making sure to avoid chicken and egg problem.

[hakfoo]

I wonder if there was also some business sabotage in effect.

It would have been extremely tempting for Intel to pressure motherboard manufacturers with some subtle messages like "Nice AMD750 board, too bad we don't have any more 440BX chips for you."

The Athlon debuted with only like three compatible mainboards, and two of them were minimally rebadged versions of the AMD reference design. Of course, it was still too compelling of a platform to ignore, and everyone got on board soon enough. But if R&D had stayed away from the Athlon market for an extra 6 months or a year, that could manifest in worse board design and optimization for quite a while.