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.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday February 01 2018, @01:05PM (4 children)
There's a positive feedback loop involved there - the 50x price is because the validation costs $V and the sales volume is Ntiny, so $V/Ntiny = 49x the price of a normal CPU.
More of the non-virtuous positive feedback loop - low volume market = infrequent product refresh cycles.
If that same $V effort were applied to the high volume product line (Nhuge) $V/Nhuge might = 0.05x the price of the chips, or less. More importantly, it would also slow delivery of product by x months on average, which is a perceived competitive cost...
I say perceived cost because, often I will buy a generation, or sometimes two, back from the bleeding edge just because they are the devils whose faces I know - Skylake was a clusterfuck, and only now am I starting to feel confident that we can deal with all of its quirks in a product. The performance gains of the next couple of generations are nice, but truly un-necessary for any application I have. Bugs, driver glitches, field patches - lack of those all matter much more to me.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Thursday February 01 2018, @01:20PM (3 children)
I'm inclined to trust market forces here. If people cared more about correctness than performance, wouldn't we expect the CPUs on the market to reflect that?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Thursday February 01 2018, @02:09PM (2 children)
Seriously? The mass CPU market is consumer driven, you trust Facebook users to decide how robust/secure the majority of CPUs manufactured and used in the world should be?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Thursday February 01 2018, @03:43PM (1 child)
Eh? Do Facebook profit by their servers being insecure?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday February 01 2018, @09:21PM
Not talking about Facebook itself profiting, talking about the mass market electronics consumers of the world (Facebook users, among others) and their "collective wisdom" with respect to reliability, security, etc. For every Facebook server machine, there are hundreds of users who access it via multiple consumer gadgets each - that's the market that needs a nanny.
🌻🌻 [google.com]