WALLONN7 Posted January 12, 2016 Share Posted January 12, 2016 A few weeks ago a team of mathematicians called the Mersenne Community, came across a bug in the Intel Skylake architecture. When such Intel systems were tasked with hunting for prime numbers, using the Prime95 software, they would reproducibly experience system freezes depending upon the program parameters. The same software "works perfectly normal" on all other Intel processors of past generations, it was noted. Source Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vibranium Posted January 12, 2016 Share Posted January 12, 2016 Yeah, they probably plan to shut off some command sets at microcode level. As one commenter said, AMD must be clapping. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rudrax Posted January 12, 2016 Share Posted January 12, 2016 Less expected from Intel. The bug that has been encountered by the mathematician with Skylake lineup, may hardly have any impact on real life applications though, yet, not expected from Intel. I hope, Intel will definitely rectify this bug on upcoming "Cannon-lake". Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vibranium Posted January 12, 2016 Share Posted January 12, 2016 Intel will surely fix this erratum in a future CPU, or they will feed their entire R&D and QA teams to the Sarlacc. Seriously though, Intel has no choice but to shut down the faulty command sets, or potentially face some horrible legal liability. Just think of aeroplanes crashing into the sea, stock markets crashing, bridges cracking, cloud servers hanging etc. etc. etc. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jtmulc Posted January 12, 2016 Share Posted January 12, 2016 Anyone remember the FPU problems from the 1st Gen Pentiums back in the day? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
hawk007 Posted January 12, 2016 Share Posted January 12, 2016 Floating point Unit bug in Pentium CPU was also discovered by a mathematician then (1994): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug Quote Some of the defective chips were later turned into key rings by Intel.[6] Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vibranium Posted January 18, 2016 Share Posted January 18, 2016 I had one of those key rings as a birthday present. Switching off command sets is not uncommon. Intel switched off TSX-NI instructions for Haswell and Broadwell by microcode updates, in order to prevent system lockups Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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