Intel Skylake Bug Causes PCs To Freeze During Complex Workloads (arstechnica.com)

Posted by samzenpus on Monday January 11, 2016 @09:00AM from the protect-ya-neck dept.

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."

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Nothing to worry about by RDW · 2016-01-11 09:16 · Score: 1, Offtopic

It probably just means the NSA is already using your processor's compute capacity as part of their vast decryption botnet. The fix should improve resource management so you won't notice it in future.