34 Design Flaws in 20 Days of Intel Core Duo

Pray_4_Mojo writes "Geek.com is reporting that Intel's errata (bug) documentation shows that the Intel Core Duo chip has 34 known issues found in the 20 days since the launch of the iMac Core Duo. (you can read the list) with only plans to fix one of them. While bugs in hardware is nothing new (the P4 has 64 known issues, at this time Intel does not plan to fix a single one) this marks one of the first times that Intel released a processor with known bugs, and some of the bugs are of higher severity than in the past. Also alarming is the rate the flaws have been found, at one and half per day since the launch of the iMac Core Duo."

Comments

Should've gone with AMD

[Anonymous Coward]

That's what Apple gets for ignoring AMD. Yet another reason why DRM (in this case, Intel's) stifles innovation.

34 design flaws and only 1/4 faster....

[tpgp]

This article from the register show's how the new Intel Macs are only 1/4 faster (rather then 2-4 times faster as Jobs claimed) then their powerpc equivilants.

Full report here. Ouch! Iphoto is actually slower for some operations.

Slightly more ontopic - I've been reading that the mere presence of the fat binaried itunes on a powerpc mac can cause the disk utility not to run - stripping intel code from the binary fixes the problem.

geek.com discovers "errata"

[gad_zuki!]

Next week they'll take on the difficult subject of "changelogs" and the mysterious "READMEs" you see everywhere.

Re:Up front

[Anonymous Coward]

No, no, you get it all wrong, man!

It's clearly an indicator that Apple should have heeded the AMD-fanbois request and choosen the cool and hip AMD-platform.

Now all 100,000 AMD-users worldwide will point their wankstained fingers at Apple and say "lolz0z, we t0ld u butt u wuodnd haer us lol!!!!1!" while feverishly jerking their shrimp-sized penii to the newest iPod-ad featuring Steve "Rim" Jobs.

Thank you

[geekoid]

AMD has always had more bugs, and some for more serious then the intel one that sparked enough consumer backlash (out of panic) to have a recall.

I have seen drastically more 'glithes' with AMD the Intel.
For the record, I only care about performance, not name.
AMD may hit higher clock rate, but that does me no good when I can't rely on the chip.

Re:Up front

[Lars T.]

Yeah, not checking your design before you release it and then make the errata available immediatly is actually much better than not checking at all - NOT!

This is hardware, not software you can justsend the customer a patch for. You may be able to fix some bugs in microcode, or the BIOS, or work around them. But it is far better to find them before you release the very first production chip.

Re:Hardware vs. Software testing

[Lars T.]

Sure those errors show up. But when you yourself find dozens of them even before you ship the damn thing, you skipped at least one turn in the testing/fixing cycle. Jesus Christ, people here complain if software that buggy ships, and this is fucking hardware. Sorry, Intel fan boys, there is no excuse.