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AMD confirms a CPU bug found by Dragonfly BSD's Matt Dillon

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TMRNetShark:

--- Quote from: kureshii on March 31, 2012, 04:05:47 AM ---This affects the 10h (K10 Phenom & Opeteron) and 12h (Fusion) microarchitectures.

Frankly it’s not really interesting to find a new CPU bug these days (except for the discoverer, perhaps). They’re not everyday occurrences, since the obvious bugs would’ve been quashed before production, and easier bugs would’ve been spotted soon after release (re. Intel’s Cougar Point chipset recall).

This one is getting attention because it was /.ed. Considering the bug was found more than 5 years after K10 launch, I’d say it isn’t really serious. Opterons and Phenom IIs around the world aren’t going to suddenly start failing like Schrödinger boxes.

--- End quote ---

So your saying the CPU ate the poison? Quick! Call Poison control! Hang in there CPU! I'm gonna rub aloe vare on your neck! 

per:

--- Quote from: kureshii on March 31, 2012, 04:05:47 AM ---This one is getting attention because it was /.ed. Considering the bug was found more than 5 years after K10 launch, I’d say it isn’t really serious. Opterons and Phenom IIs around the world aren’t going to suddenly start failing like Schrödinger boxes.

--- End quote ---

Whether or not the bug is serious is debatably.

Since it (basically) triggers random stack-pointer, albeit very infrequently, it is
actually way more serious than as an example the FPU multiplication error bug.

This kind of error causes the program to crash and burn, which is usually
considered more serious.

However, especially for windows-based workstations, people are not all that
surprised if a program crash randomly every few months. So perhaps it is not
all that serious after all.

Then again, the opterons are server CPU:s, and usually paired with ECC memory etc
to increase reliability. Crashes in servers can be more serious.

Then again, all large scale systems handles random crashes rather well, including whole computers
(or cluser of nodes) going down. So, again, it is probably mostly an annoyance. :)

kitamesume:
the crash only happened on the most precise scenario, to make it more meaningless the scenario occurs very rarely that makes the bug too rare to occur, making it ignorable.

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