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Intel Skylake Bug Causes PCs To Freeze During Complex Workloads (arstechnica.com)
chalsall writes: Intel has confirmed an in-the-wild bug that can freeze its Skylake processors. The company is pushing out a BIOS fix. Ars reports: "No reason has been given as to why the bug occurs, but it's confirmed to affect both Linux and Windows-based systems. Prime95, which has historically been used to benchmark and stress-test computers, uses Fast Fourier Transforms to multiply extremely large numbers. A particular exponent size, 14,942,209, has been found to cause the system crashes. While the bug was discovered using Prime95, it could affect other industries that rely on complex computational workloads, such as scientific and financial institutions. GIMPS noted that its Prime95 software "works perfectly normal" on all other Intel processors of past generations."
Old-timers will remember the Pentium 5 FDIV bug where the chip sometimes yielded incorrect results for complex mathematical calculations.
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If you saw the actual errata list for processors on launch day, regardless of manufacturer, your jaw would drop. A lot of nasties get cleaned up on subsequent revisions (mask changes), but in the meantime patches show up for the BIOS, libraries, and compilers so that the user never sees the warts. With Billions of transistors there will be design errors that even intel will not catch during verification or characterization. The fact that a BIOS fix will take care of it is a sign that it is not that egregious.
If you want to avoid this kind of stuff you should wait a few months after any major shakeup to buy.