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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: 2, Interesting) by shrewdsheep on Wednesday January 31 2018, @09:40PM (2 children)

    by shrewdsheep (5215) on Wednesday January 31 2018, @09:40PM (#631190)

    In defence of the chip designers, cycle-by-cycle emulation of new chip designs is becoming more and more difficult due to complexity. Emulating just a single boot-up can take weeks.

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  • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday January 31 2018, @09:59PM

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Wednesday January 31 2018, @09:59PM (#631199) Journal

    That is an argument for the same effort being less effective. It is not an argument for reducing the effort. Quite the opposite!

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 01 2018, @04:02PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 01 2018, @04:02PM (#631512)

    Emulating a boot up isn't going to spot problems like Meltdown or Spectre. Or many other bugs.