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Thread: News - Bug discovered in some AMD processor families

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    News - Bug discovered in some AMD processor families

    Affects unknown families of processors under heavy load in rare test case.
    Read more.

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    Re: News - Bug discovered in some AMD processor families

    Well, not as bad as Intels FDIV bug at least!
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    Re: News - Bug discovered in some AMD processor families

    "Matt himself stated that the bug was so difficult"

    Yawn!! So just another example of errata then?? All Intel and AMD CPU families have errata lists.

    The tech press seems more like a load of tabloids.
    Last edited by CAT-THE-FIFTH; 06-03-2012 at 11:32 AM.

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    Re: News - Bug discovered in some AMD processor families

    http://download.intel.com/design/pro...pdt/322166.pdf


    errata ist for Intel i5 ^^ notice how many have ` No Fix` attached.

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    Re: News - Bug discovered in some AMD processor families

    I have to agree this is just a normal errata class bug. This should not have any impact on AMD sales or reputation.

    Perhaps just the way it was discovered is interesting and news worthy!

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    Re: News - Bug discovered in some AMD processor families

    Quote Originally Posted by Millennium View Post
    I have to agree this is just a normal errata class bug. This should not have any impact on AMD sales or reputation.

    Perhaps just the way it was discovered is interesting and news worthy!
    Its due to the BD hissy fit halo.

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    Re: News - Bug discovered in some AMD processor families

    interesting to see that real world use of BD , users are actually happy....

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    Re: News - Bug discovered in some AMD processor families

    Quote Originally Posted by Millennium View Post
    I have to agree this is just a normal errata class bug. This should not have any impact on AMD sales or reputation.

    Perhaps just the way it was discovered is interesting and news worthy!
    Indeed, it's rare for an end-user to discover a CPU hardware bug! As a programmer it's something you don't want to consider and from what I gather it took the chap over a year to track down.

    But also it's PR in that, it had been reported before HEXUS picked it up and not in-depth, if you're not as knowledgeable of CPUs, what would you think?

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    Re: News - Bug discovered in some AMD processor families

    Quote Originally Posted by Scribe View Post
    Indeed, it's rare for an end-user to discover a CPU hardware bug! As a programmer it's something you don't want to consider and from what I gather it took the chap over a year to track down.
    Is there any more info on his year long search?? Is there a link - I want to know!!

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    Re: News - Bug discovered in some AMD processor families

    Quote Originally Posted by CAT-THE-FIFTH View Post
    Is there any more info on his year long search?? Is there a link - I want to know!!
    and why is he not doing *anything* more productive for the last year , and was he getting paid to do real work

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    Re: News - Bug discovered in some AMD processor families

    Quote Originally Posted by CAT-THE-FIFTH View Post
    Is there any more info on his year long search?? Is there a link - I want to know!!
    As requested: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.os.dra...d.kernel/14471

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    Re: News - Bug discovered in some AMD processor families

    At the very least, the bug results in a crash as opposed to the CPU presenting incorrect data to a program
    Indeed, but I wonder if, with enough work, one could get a better idea of how the stack pointer corruption occurs and engineer a situation in which a jump to a specified memory location could be achieved.
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    Re: News - Bug discovered in some AMD processor families

    the bug was reproduced by creating a test-case that, "through a very specific sequence of consecutive back-to-back pops and (near) return instructions, can create a condition where the process incorrectly updates the stack pointer," leading to a segmentation fault.
    I'm going to suggest something potentially dumb (in which case take pity on me) but if it's "a very specific sequence" that's required to cause this to happen, then surely it'd be possible to put in a compiler fix to ensure that it doesn't ever generate this sequence? Assuming that this issue is a big deal, and not one of those "1 in a billion operations" type events.

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    Re: News - Bug discovered in some AMD processor families

    That's exactly what you do, crossy. The irony of course was that it was code in a compiler that actually caused the crash... so the compiler needs recompiling.

    That doesn't stop somebody writing assembly code to create the same bug, however... but as long as there's no security issue surrounding this bug (see my previous post), that's not a problem.
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    Re: News - Bug discovered in some AMD processor families

    Quote Originally Posted by Steve View Post
    That's exactly what you do, crossy. The irony of course was that it was code in a compiler that actually caused the crash... so the compiler needs recompiling. That doesn't stop somebody writing assembly code to create the same bug, however... but as long as there's no security issue surrounding this bug (see my previous post), that's not a problem.
    Oh right - I got the distinct impression from the article that this was a design flaw in the processors themselves rather than software trying to ask for something silly.

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    Re: News - Bug discovered in some AMD processor families

    No, it is a bug in the processor. However, the compiler was the only thing so far that's been shown to run the sequence of instructions that cause the bug

    So it's easy enough to work around.
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