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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 31 2018, @05:42PM (6 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 31 2018, @05:42PM (#631037)

    x64 is marketing speak for x86-64. Itanic was a whole different disaster.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 31 2018, @06:02PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 31 2018, @06:02PM (#631051)

    Yep, I meant ia64. God sucks as a validation engineer for my brain.

    • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 31 2018, @08:00PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 31 2018, @08:00PM (#631130)

      He put those bugs in there so that he could exploit them later.

  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 31 2018, @06:41PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 31 2018, @06:41PM (#631083)

    x86-64 was AMD's original name
    x86_64 was chosen by Linux people, based on the above
    IA-32e was Intel's fucked-up name for it, since IA-64 was already taken by Itanium
    AMD64 was AMD's response to Intel's attempt to claim the architecture as IA-32e
    x64 was Microsoft's attempt to pick something simple and neutral

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 31 2018, @09:40PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 31 2018, @09:40PM (#631189)

      Fuck this. ARM64 for everything.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 01 2018, @01:02PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 01 2018, @01:02PM (#631452)

        You mean aa64?

    • (Score: 2) by Wootery on Thursday February 01 2018, @09:56AM

      by Wootery (2341) on Thursday February 01 2018, @09:56AM (#631395)

      The nice thing about standards is that you have so many to choose from; furthermore, if you do not like any of them, you can just wait for next year's model.

      -Tanenbaum