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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday January 31 2018, @05:14PM   Printer-friendly
from the doesn't-raid-fix-this? dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

In 2015, Microsoft senior engineer Dan Luu forecast a bountiful harvest of chip bugs in the years ahead.

"We've seen at least two serious bugs in Intel CPUs in the last quarter, and it's almost certain there are more bugs lurking," he wrote. "There was a time when a CPU family might only have one bug per year, with serious bugs happening once every few years, or even once a decade, but we've moved past that."

Thanks to growing chip complexity, compounded by hardware virtualization, and reduced design validation efforts, Luu argued, the incidence of hardware problems could be expected to increase.

This month's Meltdown and Spectre security flaws that affect chip designs from AMD, Arm, and Intel to varying degrees support that claim. But there are many other examples.


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by MrGuy on Wednesday January 31 2018, @06:07PM

    by MrGuy (1007) on Wednesday January 31 2018, @06:07PM (#631054)

    Your premise is mistaken. TFA is an article on The Register. The Register article begins with a two-sentence quote form a Microsoft engineer, and a one-sentence summary of his point, but that's it. The rest is original reporting.

    I'd object to this article because it's so darn elementary - yes, chips can have bugs, and Spectre/Meltdown aren't the only chip bugs out there. The article is a few quotes sprinkled with a list of a few recent flaws. But there's no interesting analysis. It's basically "here are some recent bugs." It would be awesome to have an article making a case WHY bugs might be more frequent now than in the past - other than the quote from Luu, the article offers no real support for that position. This article seems like it was written by someone who doesn't really understand the subject and has nothing really to say (some would argue that's hardly unique on El Reg) - when your best argument is a three-year old blog post from someone ELSE who might know what they're talking about, you should be asking why this article matters...

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