However, this wasn't always so. The problem first appeared last year, and several of the manufacturers blamed it on an incompatibility with an Adaptec SCSI accelerator. Adaptec denied this, and said it was the Macs. The problem has do with speculative processing, a type of look-ahead guessing of what the processor is going to do that speeds performance. It also exists in Pentiums, where Intel calls it dynamic execution .
Speculative processing works fine with memory space.
The problems occur more frequently with the G4 because it can handle more speculative processing than the G3. The symptoms that can occur have to do with hardware. Hardware devices are the most likely to fail, because volatile memory is virtually always associated with them. This incompatibility can cause loss of data. PowerLogix and XLR8 downplay this, but don't deny it.