Intel Discloses Chip Glitch

I wonder how they found this issue in the first place.

Win7User512 said:

I wonder how they found this issue in the first place.

Intel missed it.
It was found through OEM testing, from what I've read.

I believe Intel is looking at a $11B income for the first quarter. They also have quite of bit of cash on hand so they will do just fine.

Jim

mikedl said:

All of you dealing with this new technology are as fortunate as I was in 1994 to be on the cutting edge. I'm a bit behind these days. I wish I had to deal with this as I love new stuff! :)

intel has a history of correcting these types of things very quickly and correctly.

I remember the The Pentium floating point bug from 1994 & Intel tried to ignore it.

Intel's initial public response stoked the flames, rather than calm them: the company set up a fax-back system to brief worried users. The message described the bug as a "subtle flaw" and estimated that the average "spreadsheet user" would encounter the problem only once in every 27,000 years. The idea that Intel wanted to get across was that the rest of the PC was bound to fall apart before your Pentium processor produced an incorrect answer. However the users immediately interpreted this as meaning that around 3 spreadsheet users a day worldwide would be getting erroneous results from their spreadsheets, with even more frequent errors for people doing serious scientific work. Most importantly, anyone doing iterative functions, where a variable is repeatedly calculated, could see the inaccuracies snowball through their calculations.

But above all, the question raised by the newsgroup was "Why didn't you tell us as soon as you knew that there was a problem, rather than keeping us in the dark?" The second question is invariably "Will you replace my chip" to which the answer seems to be "probably not". Unless you can show Intel that you are doing high powered mathematics that needs full double precision figures Intel is unlikely to oblige. To-date we only have two reported examples to draw on: one Pentium user; an undergraduate mathematics student says that he had his request for a replacement chip turned down, despite the fact that he could be doing these complex calculations on his PC. The other user, using his computer for medical analysis ("if you were going under the knife, would you want to know that the analysis may be wrong?") says that he was put on the list for a replacement after 10 minutes of discussion with an Intel rep.

Ooops!

p5bdkw said:

Win7User512 said:

I wonder how they found this issue in the first place.

Intel missed it.
It was found through OEM testing, from what I've read.

But I'm surprised someone found a flaw that, if it causes a failure at all, showed up in a much shorter time than expected.

I expect I will be upgrading to a Intel Core i7-2600K this year its a great over-clocker.

Core i7-2600K Overclocked: Speed Meets Efficiency : Overclocking And Efficiency Go Hand-In-Hand

I may also. But I want to see what AMD's Bulldozer is first. Someone on these boards said that Bulldozer is to be released in March. I just want to see what all of my options are before I spend money on a new rig. Sounds like it will not be a delay anyway. Last I heard Intel says the new Sandy Bridge boards won't be out until April anyway. I'm not a fanboy of either, I'll use whichever one best suits my needs (wants really). Most of the better processors out now will suit my 'needs'.