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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."
I just think it means that Intel is being more honest about the problems, rather then hiding them til others find them.
Maybe they're just getting faster/better at finding bugs?
Bradley Holt
You do realize that there is an 85 page PDF of errors in the AMD64, right?
this marks one of the first times that Intel released a processor with known bugs
No: either it is the first time or it is not. There can be only one... first time.
and some of the bugs are of higher severity then in the past
then != than
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
How many "bugs" are in Athlons?/Duron/Semprons?
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
It's a little disohnest to use the phrasing "Core Duo chip has 34 known issues found in the 20 days since the launch of the iMac Core Duo."
Most of these bugs were found well before the release of Core Duo. Many of the bugs are listed as having been observed by Intel only. That means the verficiation teams did hit these issues, either with very bizarre code setup, or doing something that's probably not technically legal anyway. Odds of seeing most of it in an end-user platform are very unlikely.
Revision Guide for AMD AthlonTM 64 and AMD OpteronTM Processors. Just for balance. (only two of them are really interesting, #113 is one of them IIRC)
Another thing here that people don't seem to get, is that just because there have been 1.5 'found' a day (I would bet most were known before general release), that says nothing about the total number of bugs. For all we know, there could be only 40 total, just most of them were found quickly.
Huh? That's clearly wrong. When Intel had its famous FDIV bug, they shipped it knowing that the problem was there (the chips were already manufactured before they noticed it in their internal design validation.) In fact I would highly doubt that any Intel chip (or AMD chip) has shipped without some known bugs in them.
Its just a question of severity. Most of these bugs tend to be highly marginal in a "real software doesn't push that hard on the CPU" sense.
Apple is not the only manufacturer using the Core Duo chip.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Why does Apple want to use an intel chip?
... uh, wait a minute ...
. html)
:-)
Oh, thats right:
Microsoft Owns Apple.
How can we tell?
1. Apple's stock only rose 25% last week.
2. Bill Gates's birthday now a paid holiday for Apple employees.
3. Default Mac startup sound changed to "Taps."
4. Wall Street brokers have stopped using Apple stock certificates as toilet paper.
5. Apple's new slogan: "Almost as good as Windows!"
6. Apple has been bent over with its pants dropped for so long now, even a geek like Bill Gates was bound to get lucky.
7. Cute rainbow-colored apple now inhabited by cute rainbow-colored worm.
8. microsoft comes out with an operating system incorporating Mac technology
9. Phone and utilities mysteriously start working again at Apple's corporate HQ.
10. Steve Jobs seen tending bar at the Gates' private lawn party.
11. Diners in Microsoft's staff cafeteria can now enjoy their apple pie purely for its wholesome goodness and no longer as a symbolic act of global domination.
12. Unsold Newtons used as cobblestones in Gates's driveway.
13. Apple Employee of the Month gets to hunt loose change at Bill's house.
14. New Apple employee dress code includes large "Property of B. Gates" tattoo on ass.
15. Bill Gates still burned in effigy, but upper management no longer attends.
(http://www.ehumorcentral.com/Directory/Jokes/838
I like #7 and #11 myself
This has been another valuable and informative opinion from:
Catahoula!
It's called "errata", and it's common for most processors to be released with pages and pages and pages of errata.
Of course, what happens is that the alpha/beta silicon ships to select customers without many errata (though internal testing often finds them too, and they ship with those). Then the manufacturer goes back, resolves a few, then the cycle repeats until everyone is happy with the bugs and it's released with a book of errata on them, and workarounds for the severe ones.
"No fix" errata are common. The most serious of those have workarounds. Fixed errata are for things where there can be no possible software workaround. But there's a large number of varying severity - from cache incoherences, lock failures (you try to lock something, and it either can't be unlocked the usual way, or it doesn't reliably indicate lock), to bus and spec violations.
Nothing new here...
This news would be a lot more interesting if I knew the size of the errata list for the G4 or the G5. I think it unlikely that there are zero unfixed bugs.
Anyone? Bueller?
Cannot run Windows XP. Classification: Minor.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
The problem with x86 comes from the fact that a large number of instructions interact in relatively complex ways with others. Changing a small amount of silicon can change a side-effect of an instruction, which is then a bug. An ISA such as Alpha eliminated this by keeping inter-instruction interactions to a minimum (no condition registers, etc).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
So not only how many bugs in Athlon, etc, but also...
How many bugs in other Pentium chips?
What was the rate of discovery of bugs in other chips?
Keep in mind that during Intel's entire history they've released one desktop processor that had a bug sufficient to require a recall. Most of the bugs are easily worked around including that one. Hell, I've got an old P60 that I was using as a router until the last year or so and it just worked fine and it was always amusing to see Linux notice the FDIV bug on boot.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Not sure I understand the point of this new article... all chips have errata. This is like reporting that the sun set again or that slashdotters have no love life.
For eample...
The MPC7410 family of chips (aka G4) from Freescale (formally part of Motorola) has 21 errata currently listed: MPC7410CE.pdf
The MPC7447 family of chips (aka G4) from Freescale has 36 errata currently listed: MPC7457CE.pdf
The PPC 970FX (aka G5) from IBM has 24 errata currently listed: 970fx_errata_dd3.x_v1.6.pdf
As an ASIC designer, I have produced my fair share of silicon bugs. Chips are expensive to produce, making bugs expensive to fix. As a result, chip designers (even ones with deep pockets like Intel) do not look at bugs as something to FIX, but rather as something to MASK. I don't mean to hide it from people (although that does happen), but to make it not a bug by working around it.
Unless the bug is so fatal that you can't work around it, or the bug could potentially cost lives, the primary solution is to work around it. Either you write driver code to avoid the bug, or you find some other cheap solution. Sometimes, it's a simple matter of removing a feature from your marketing literature.
Intel's typical means to mask processor bugs is microcode. This hurts performance, but they can typically create a workaround that routes everything around the bug. I can't read the article (it's slashdotted), but I'm sure that by saying they won't fix some bugs, they're saying that they won't respin the silicon but rather mask the bug in some other way.
Listing the bugs (and not fixing them in this version) is an appropriate thing for Intel to do.
(I'm no Intel fanboy. I think they're bastards. But this is NOT an example of them being bastards.)
http://www.amd.com/us-en/assets/content_type/white _papers_and_tech_docs/25759.pdf
And as an aside, it took two seconds (actually .08) seconds to look up on Google. Maybe try that next time.
How pathetic are you that you follow me from topic to topic and waste all your mod points at once modding me down?
I didn't bother to actually count the number of unfixed or no fix planned glitches / bugs in there, so I don't know if it actually validates the 80+ the grandparent claimed, but there are quite a few known bugs in A64 and its HTT bus.
In fact there are going to be any CPU released, even stuff like Power / Itanium / USpark are going to have errata like this. Microprocessors are inredibly complex equipment, and 100% stable and glitch free under all possible conditions just isn't going to happen. Who ever submitted this story is blowing this entirely out of proportion. The link is already Slashdotted so I haven't gotten a chance to read what the bugs / glitches are, but I would be good money a normal user could go through the entire life of their Core Dou Mac and never notice one. These are typically very small gliches / bugs that occur under very specific conditions, and are meant more for hardware manufacturers to be aware of than they are to warn a user there could be problems with their chips.
publishing them publicly I think is a good move on Intel's part, but they do run this risk where people don't understand that this is a completely and utterly ordinary and expected thing to happen.
http://www.amd.com/us-en/assets/content_type/white _papers_and_tech_docs/25759.pdf
And you think that the A64, and P4 are clean and squaeky?
... for the first time, they're releasing the chip for a stable OS first.
It used to be that testers only had an unstable testbed OS (designed primarily to run the same company's office suite) to use for validatation. Testers were never quite sure before where the blue screens, lockups, funny noises, and billowing smoke actually originated.
(Relax, it's just a joke).
sigs, as if you care.
That assumes that intel wants the safety critical market for this processor. In most cases, when you develop in this sector, you have to use hardware that is specificly designed for these applications. developing chips that can be certified for SC applications can be a pain in the ass, and the may simply not car for this chip.
All chips have errata, and custmarily are well documented and are published on the vendor's web site. BTW, errata can be something as simple as a correction to the datasheet. Most are usually minor and are dealt with by the compiler. For example, if there's an error with calculations dealing with a certain registry and decimal values, the compiler would just not use that registry for the calculations.
The documented and known errata are not what you should be concerned with. It's the unknown ones that freeze your computer or cause all robots to attack their masters.
If someone's complaining about this, they should just turn off their computers, because as we ALL know, every operating system (the OS is what runs on chips that have the errata) also are shipped with hundreds, if not thousands, of known bugs. You're not going to find a perfect chip in the real world. How many errata did the G4/G5 have? By comparison the IBM PowerPC 970FX has 24 errata, none of which is planned for a fix. When you consider the 970FX is a fairly mature chip, 34 errata on a new chip is hardly news worthy. As transistors get more and more compact and miniaturized, I'm sure we're bound to see more.
AE 16:
Show-stopper but only observed by Intel so far. Also, any OS developer who codes like this deserves this one.
Hmmmm....
What wast the (newsworthy or not) bug per CPU per release count BEFORE switching to Intel? What happened to all that new-fangled "chip simulation" stuff? Seems if this erratta is not just typos and such, then the SIMulation needs some STIMulation to be more useful.
I wonder if AppTel did a "test design" before the Apple side of the house went to market. As for "finding the bugs faster", I am wondering if Apple found them and told Intel, "fixem or we go back to IBM, even if IBM charges more money to come back-but you can be sure we won't pay YOU over flaws we specced to be avoided...", assuming Apple could foresee and document what to avoid.
As for Intel being "more honest", heck, I am willing to assume Apple has a better branding position than Intel, and Apple is not going to stand for Intel using it's mammoth inventory and factory count to roll over people. Any heavy computer user-- particularly Mac users who make money by USING their computers in small businesses-- will not tolerate Intel chips if things don't turn around.
And, finally, I imagine Jobs will do a war-dance job in Intel if they think ONE bug fix is all that's required or if they think they can get away with fixing only ONE bug. But, if they are firm on fixing only ONE "BUG", then maybe they have refunds, refurbs, exchanges, chip-swaps... and/or a new chip in the pipeline...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Your comment is misleading. The document lists only 61 errata and contains their respective details. The initial table of errata -- table 5 -- is only four pages long (begins 13 and ends 16) and is most likely to group the problems by the wafer families; the next two pages reiterate the errata for each given brand name of AMD K7/K8 chip; all but one of the remaining pages detail the errata and their suggested workarounds/fixes. The last page is a list of extra resources.
I don't dispute your comment regarding the experience of a chipset designer.
Well, that's what you get when you stick to crufted designs and try to keep them at all costs although there are known better archtectures. It's just like code: it gets unmaintainable over time.
Ah. Ok. So then -- do these "known better archtectures [sic]" have no bugs then? Significantly fewer bugs? Are the bugs less severe? And how do they compare to the Intel/AMD architectures in terms of speed? I can assure you that I can make a chip that is 100% bug free -- it's also going to run somewhere in the vicinity of the original 8008.
Frankly, I doubt you know all that much about the real ISA that Intel or AMD execute on their cores. The x86 instructions are never executed -- they're translated into an internal only ISA that doesn't look anything even vaguely like the x86 ISA.
I'm so sick and tired of all these kids out of college whining about the x86 ISA. And yeah, I was there once too. But know what? That decreipt, horrible, ghastly API has outlasted every single competitor, has been upgraded from 8-bits to 64-bits without losing backwards compatibility, and runs far, far faster than every chip that's tried to take away the title. And costs less. Intel's proven the doom 'n' gloom wrong everytime -- including with their latest transition off the Netburst architecture. AMD has as well (I give Intel props because for decades they were the only real designers for the x86 ISA; AMD is pretty much responsible for the latest incarnation as x86-64 though).
If you look at any of the modern chip architectures then none of them fall nicely and neatly into "CISC" or "RISC". The Power architecture is awfully CISC like in some ways. The x86 (the classic CISC) doesn't use a complex ISA internally, it has pipelining, branch prediction, caching, etc. -- all classic RISC subsystems that were never supposed to work on CISC. Everyone is multi-core now (to various extents).
The x86 architecture isn't going anywhere. If anything Apple's move should've reinforced this concept -- the fact of the matter is that Intel spends more in R&D than every other (general purpose) chip maker on the planet. Combined. And sells their product for less. That kind of R&D budget makes up for a lot of paper shortcomings.
Welcome to the real world.
You also have to bear in mind that designs are modular and have limited connections, so N transistors is not a meaningful number - you should only be concerned with the number of modules and the number of interconnects. (eg: a 32-bit register will obviously take more transistors than an 8-bit register, but both are simply cut-and-paste copies of a 1-bit register. So long as you have the 1-bit form correct, there is no increase in complexity no matter how wide the register becomes.)
As for the interconnects - if you have N modules, you have an upper limit of !N possible interactions, if you can string any possible combination together. That's a big number, even for small values of N. But most of those don't exist. You cannot feed the output of one operation directly into the input of another. There are some special cases where there is a chain of events, but it is not something you can program with total freedom. Many operations just produce a result which is pushed back into the registers. Thus, N modules will produce only a little more than N interactions of interest. That is a much more managable number.
Then you need to consider that processors aren't "open floor plan". They are highly segmented. The term "floating point unit" literally does refer to a definable segment of the chip that is designed for floating point work. Again, from the standpoint of reliability, you can test each unit independently before doing an integrated test, so unit tests don't need to concern themselves with overall complexity or the number of other units out there.
Next up is the cost of a recall. Recalls are expensive. From a pure profit standpoint, you want to spend less on QA than you'd spend on a recall, but the less you spend on QA, the more you are likely to end up spending on that recall. The ideal is to reduce the number of potentially serious bugs to the point where any further initial clean-up will cost more than the money lost in cleaning up afterwards. Less QA than that will cost more than it saves. More QA than that will also cost more than it saves unless it expands the market (ie: the chip becomes good enough to be used in mission-critical systems such as life-support or fly-by-wire systems), but is sometimes good to do anyway for PR reasons.
Finally, not all transistors are "important". Once you know the cache algorithm works, the actual cache memory is irrelevent - memory is rarely implemented "incorrectly", it doesn't "do" anything (the active part is the algorithm), it's just heap.
With modern software verification tools, chip validation suites and the high level of understanding of microelectronics, an average of one bug for every four or five instructions is high. I would consider a chip with a third as many bugs to be only just acceptable for home use, and a thirtieth as many for operations in which any significant number of people would be put at risk. The extra cost would be minimal (compared to all the other costs) and would still be much less than the cost to Intel of the Pentium divide bug or to Transmeta of the flaws in their initial Crusoe chips.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)