Ah, just two processors without clock syncronization. Fast-forward 6 years and we have ways to explore memory that was cached for instructions that won't be executed, and leak the hell of the processors' hearts.
This article pairs nicely with bcantrill's recently released talk "The Hurricane's Butterfly: Debugging Pathologically Performing Systems" https://youtu.be/7AO4wz6gI3Q
It's always fun when you get to the bottom of one of these and find out some seemingly absurd mistake or design flaw, each layer peeled away reveals a new level of excitement. Even when it's not in hardware it opens up your eyes about the potential fallibility of all the layers beneath whatever you are doing.
And just about that time I notice the extra semicolon, delete it and recompile.
I was always a fan of OpenOffice's "won't print on Tuesdays" bug..