While this was a PR disaster for Intel, for me the Pentium FOOF bug[1] was much more consequential since it meant anyone could run a trivial command to lock up our shared Linux machines. Luckily Linux found a fix for it fairly quickly.
From the article: "Intel believed it was justn’t a big deal". Is it a thing in English language to form "justn't" like that as a shortcut for "just not"?
Have a friend who was doing is masters at the time in neural networks, and was making use of FP a lot. He was getting strange results, especially in comparing what he was getting at home on his PC and what he was getting in the school labs on SPARC.
He had (a) do a lot of effort to 'prove' to Intel that his CPU was faulty, and then (b) sign an NDA to get a replacement chip.
A week after he signed the agreement and sent it in they publicly announced the recall.
Q: How many Pentium designers does it take to screw in a light
bulb?
A: 1.99904274017, but that's close enough for non-technical
people.
Q: What do you get when you cross a Pentium PC with a research
grant?
A: A mad scientist.
Q: What's another name for the "Intel Inside" sticker they put
on Pentiums?
A: The warning label.
Q: What do you call a series of FDIV instructions on a Pentium?
A: Successive approximations.
Q: Complete the following word analogy: Add is to Subtract as
Multiply is to:
1) Divide
2) ROUND
3) RANDOM
4) On a Pentium, all of the above
A: Number 4.
Q: Why didn't Intel call the Pentium the 586?
A: Because they added 486 and 100 on the first Pentium and got
585.999983605.
Q: According to Intel, the Pentium conforms to the IEEE
standards 754 and 854 for floating point arithmetic.
If you fly in aircraft designed using a Pentium, what is the
correct pronunciation of "IEEE"?
A: Aaaaaaaiiiiiiiiieeeeeeeeeeeee!
TOP TEN NEW INTEL SLOGANS FOR THE PENTIUM
-------------------------------------------
9.9999973251 It's a FLAW, Dammit, not a Bug
8.9999163362 It's Close Enough, We Say So
7.9999414610 Nearly 300 Correct Opcodes
6.9999831538 You Don't Need to Know What's Inside
5.9999835137 Redefining the PC -- and Mathematics As Well
4.9999999021 We Fixed It, Really
3.9998245917 Division Considered Harmful - No Life-
Maintenance Devices Should Be Used With This
Processor
2.9991523619 Why Do You Think They Call It *Floating* Point?
1.9999103517 We're Looking for a Few Good Flaws
And the 0.9999999998th Slogan Is...
The Errata Inside
23 comments
[ 0.26 ms ] story [ 66.7 ms ] thread[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_F00F_bug
Wah
Penta- comes from the Greek, so hexa- would be more appropriate:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numeral_prefix
The Latin is quint- and sext-.
And if you have a movie trilogy, and one more move comes out, it becomes a tetralogy, and not a quadrilogy, also because of Greek etymology:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetralogy
i386 – Intel i386/80386 (in 1985) or AMD386 / AM386 (in 1991)
i486 – Intel i486/80486 (in 1989) or AMD486 / AM486 (in 1993)
i586 – Intel Pentium (in 1993) or AMD-K5 (in 1996)
i686 – Intel Pentium Pro & 2 (in 1995) or AMD-K6 (in 1997)
i786 – Intel Pentium 4 (in 2000) or AMD-K7 (in 1999)
https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/7...
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-02-fi-1893-s...
He had (a) do a lot of effort to 'prove' to Intel that his CPU was faulty, and then (b) sign an NDA to get a replacement chip.
A week after he signed the agreement and sent it in they publicly announced the recall.