Intel Reveals Itanium 2 Glitch

NeoChichiri writes "News.com is running on an article about glitches in Intel's Itanium 2 chips. Even though it doesn't affect all chips, they have still stopped shipments of the new 450 Servers until the problem is resolved. Apparently it has to be 'a specific set of operations in a specific sequence with specific data.' Intel is saying that affects the 900MHz and 1 GHz Itanium 2 chips and that it will not affect the upcoming 1.5 GHz Itanium 2 6M chips." Until the next iteration of chip arrives though, Oliver Wendell Jones writes, "they recommend working around the problem by underclocking the processor to run at 800 MHz instead of its default 900 MHz or 1 GHz."

Comments

Pork or Lamb?

[iworm]

Itanium 2 chops?... ?

Methinks dear Timothy hasn't really grapsed what "editing" really means.

That something like lamb chops?

[Cytlid]

NeoChichiri writes "News.com is running on an article about glitches in Intel's Itanium 2 chips. Even though it doesn't affect all chips, they have still stopped shipments of the new 450 Servers until the problem is resolved. Apparently it has to be 'a specific set of operations in a specific sequence with specific data.' Intel is saying that affects the 900MHz and 1 GHz Itanium 2 chops and that it will not affect the upcoming 1.5 GHz Itanium 2 6M chips." Until the next iteration of chip arrives though, Oliver Wendell Jones writes, "they recommend working around the problem by underclocking the processor to run at 800 MHz instead of its default 900 MHz or 1 GHz."

Chips... chops... I'm confused...

Re:Glitch?

[PetWolverine]

Good question. And I'd like the moderator who called it redundant to show me a link to the previous post that said the same thing, because I can't seem to find it.

Re:Microcode?

[questionlp]

Buying some Sun UltraSPARC II processors with 8MB eCache is also like playing dice with your business if the processor was equipped with faulty cache chips (or chips that would flake out in certain environments). I believe Sun also had an issue with their UltraSPARC III processor where you could apply a microcode update or a patch which effectively knocked the performance of the chip off by a bit.

At least Intel has accepted that it's a real issue rather than a customer problem and providing a workaround and a fix to the processors. Anyway, the Itanium 2 is not a first-run chip, rather a re-work of the original Itanium (though a far amount of the design came from HP which was then tuned and produced by Intel).