Intel Skylake bug seizes up PCs running complex workloads

[HEXUS]

Bug was discovered by mathematicians using Prime95 software. BIOS update fix is promised.

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[lumireleon]

.....AMD is clapping hands

[Brian224]

The Pentium bug was discovered by a maths professor working on primes - coincidence?

(For those too young to remember 1994, a joke at the time was Q "How do you carry out accurate calculations using a Pentium computer?" A "Steady your slide rule against it".)

[azrael-]

Wait for the inevitable disabling of BCLK overclocking piggybacking this update...

[DemonHighwayman]

Skylake isn't doing too well, first news that they used a thinner material that bends and breaks under the weight of a heatsink ! and now they are unable to do complex workloads... and all for a 5-10% increase in performance over the last gen' haswell chips.

[sykobee]

Most processors have a massive list of bugs and errata - normally they are found before release and worked around with firmware. Of course, once released, getting firmware fixes to end systems becomes far more difficult, and also disabling features may have to be done to fix it, which can lead to a lot of anger.

[qasdfdsaq]

Skylake isn't doing too well, first news that they used a thinner material that bends and breaks under the weight of a heatsink ! and now they are unable to do complex workloads... and all for a 5-10% increase in performance over the last gen' haswell chips.

Yeah, I can totally hear the uproar from the hundreds of thousands of owners of Skylake systems...


... Meanwhile Haswell's TSX was also broken on release. It couldn't do complex workloads either!

[DanceswithUnix]

.....AMD is clapping hands

Piledriver was Bulldozer with the performance sapping bugs fixed. Glass houses and all that, I doubt they are celebrating too much, probably more just looking nervously at Zen samples.

[semitope]

Wait for the inevitable disabling of BCLK overclocking piggybacking this update...

yeah. it seems intel likes to do crap like this. I had to downgrade my bios to get the measly 3.9Ghz on all cores for my 4770.

[Vasot02]

Skylakes series is not what most people expected do not forget it was also overhyped because of being the first mainstream solution with DDR4 support. The bangs per buck are lower, the clock rates indicate trouble at mill. Intel has no real competition and has become lazy.

[kalniel]

Skylakes series is not what most people expected do not forget it was also overhyped because of being the first mainstream solution with DDR4 support. The bangs per buck are lower, the clock rates indicate trouble at mill. Intel has no real competition and has become lazy.

And yet they still provide faster chips at the same prices (currency/market fluctuations aside) which have cost them millions in R&D. If they're only competing with themselves then they're doing more than they have to.

[DanceswithUnix]

And yet they still provide faster chips at the same prices (currency/market fluctuations aside) which have cost them millions in R&D. If they're only competing with themselves then they're doing more than they have to.

Agreed. Specially in the data center I think they are quite vulnerable and they know it.

If progress seems slow, perhaps that is largely because making a faster x86 is hard.