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Out of curiosity, if you notice a CPU bug in a computer under warranty, is there anything the vendor is usually obligated do, or are they under no obligation to do anything about a CPU bug? Is that considered a defect they have to handle?

(Edit: I'm assuming the USA, and I'm assuming bugs that were not known to the vendor at the time of the sale.)

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Under Australian law, it depends on if the defect is material, and if it would have reasonably changed your buying decision.

A 30% performance reduction (like the page table isolation fixes) probably would be considered material.

> Under Australian law, it depends on if the defect is material, and if it would have reasonably changed your buying decision.

Interesting, so if you need that particular product (say it has something specific you need, e.g. a program that only runs well on Intel) and there is no competitor to it with that particular feature (e.g. AMD CPU runs the program poorly) then they can sell you as otherwise-defective of a product as they want and you cannot recover damages?

Or to put it another way, there is no notion of "I would have still bought it because I needed it but knowledge of the defect would have lowered its market value"?

Interesting point. I don't know if this has ever been tested in court, and I am not a lawyer, especially a consumer law lawyer, but I reckon the court system would probably handle it in some way. The ACL is written to be quite equitable, and courts have generally interpreted it as such.

Apple recently had to replace Iphone batteries because there device became slougish. So there is precedent.

Apple didn't have to replace batteries, they chose to do it to quiet down the bad PR they were receiving.

When Intel issues a microcode update to slow down aging Skylake processors so that everyone goes out to buy Cannonlake, you might be able to draw a comparison.

Sorry maybe I used the wrong word "precendence". But there is a similarity and Apple is still beeing sued. And purely a PR move is also misleading.

Under EU law (this is not legal advice), any bug that wasn't known to you at time of sale, but was present at time of sale, has to be fixed by the vendor. For 2 years after sale usually, some countries have longer (afaik, Norway for example has it set at 5 years. As EEA member, they also follow the EU laws on warranty).

Ahh, I was referring to the US, and bugs that weren't known at the time of sale (I'll edit this in), but thank you, this is still useful information.

See the three-year warranty here for boxed CPUs: https://www.intel.com/content/dam/support/us/en/documents/pr...

Note the first bullet under "WHAT THIS LIMITED WARRANTY DOES NOT COVER":

"design defects or errors in the Product (Errata). Contact Intel for information on characterized errata."

Guess we're not covered on this one.

EDIT: That being said, given the potential scope of this issue (years of affected CPUs, massive PR hit) I'm hoping that Intel will at least offer some remedy to recent buyers. According to the article from The Register [1], OS vendors have been working on the fix since November. The blog posted over on pythonsweetness [2] posits the bug may have been identified in October. It'd be interesting to know for how long Intel has been selling Coffee Lake CPUs that are known to be vulnerable.

[1] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/02/intel_cpu_design_fl...

[2] http://pythonsweetness.tumblr.com/post/169166980422/the-myst...

Thanks for posting this!

It seems self-contradictory to me. How can Intel warrant that

> the Product will substantially conform to Intel’s publicly available specifications

while simultaneously disclaiming warranty for

> design defects or errors in the Product (Errata)

If an instruction does something different than what their specs say on occasion, do they take that to mean it's substantially conforming to their specs?

I'm no lawyer, but my instincts tell me someone would have to prove that the chips today do not conform to Intel's specs, and that this difference is such that the CPU no longer "substantially conforms" to the spec.

> If an instruction does something different than what their specs say on occasion, do they take that to mean it's substantially conforming to their specs?

We're on the same page. What do you think Intel will argue?

Keep in mind Intel did initiate a substantial recall of Pentium CPUs in the late 90s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug

I mean they would likely argue it's still substantially conforming even if it has bugs that come up, but I'm trying to figure out what kind of a case they could actually win.

Why try to win a case if all you need is a settlement? Going into an actual trial is far riskier than negotiating a settlement, for both sides.

What they're saying is that they'll replace your chip if it behaves differently from all the other chips of the same model, not if ALL the chips are broken by design.

Where does their sentence about the specification come into play in your interpretation?

"the Product will substantially conform to Intel’s publicly available specifications"

They're saying that it should work as specified for the most part. And apparently the CPUs do, since they've been in continuous use for many years.

Note that they also have this exception:

"… THIS LIMITED WARRANTY DOES NOT COVER: … that the Product will protect against all possible security threats, including intentional misconduct by third parties;"

Which is likely designed to handle issues just like this one.

Easy: Erratas are actually specification updates. (And indeed, not just by sound and smoke, since most errata are never fixed but rather declared this-is-how-it-works-now).

In some abstract, philosophical sense it means that the specs are actually elected by majority of the produced processors.

Good luck explaining to a random vendor what the problem is though. They also need to verify that the problem exists and most of them won't have a clue what you're talking about, they'll just turn the computer on and notice that it's working.

If you're a company buying from more qualified vendors then it might be a different story, however at that point consumer law does not apply to you.

Well depending on how this is turning out there will be benchmarks that show the chips performing slower than before. I've read that many chips will be getting 17% slower in the best case and up to 30% in the worst case. That could be enough to warrant a return of the product.

Yes, however most computers are marketed using GHz numbers, not experienced performance (And in the cases where they are it's relative, like x times faster than before). It's hard to show a 17% slowdown to a store clerk.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for being able to return a product that's 17% slower today than yesterday, I'm just saying it might be difficult since it's an issue that requires a degree of technical knowledge to understand which most store clerks don't have.

I agree with most of what you say, but why do you take for granted that it's up to the customer to demonstrate that the product is defective? Furthermore, where does the idea that the customer must be able to communicate this to a uninformed clerk come from?

> Under EU law (this is not legal advice), any bug that wasn't known to you at time of sale, but was present at time of sale, has to be fixed by the vendor.

Is this true for software as well?

The law applies to any sale between a consumer and a company, even one for free.

It does also apply to software, but software vendors will rather refund you than fix it.

> The law applies to any sale between a consumer and a company, even one for free.

There is no such thing as a free sale, and no, when you are gifted something, then you don't get the EU warranty protection.

I think it's more referring to offers like these:

* Buy One Get One Free * Free USB-C to A hub with your new Macbook Pro

I would expect the free item to be covered in these cases?

> any bug that wasn't known to you at time of sale, but was present at time of sale, has to be fixed by the vendor

Unfortunately, this is incorrect on many levels.

First, under EU warranty laws, it's not any bug that is covered, but defects that have been assured or are expected to not be present. I'd expect disclaimers to allow for certain errata, for example. EDIT: user ta_wh posted an example for such a disclaimer in a sibling comment.

Second, the vendor is usually not the manufacturer, and therefore seldom in the position to fix the defect themselves.

Third, depending on the nature of the defect, the vendor might have other options besides fixing it/getting it fixed, eg: discount, or returns.

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