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Comment by julianpye | Hacker News Reader

In the end despite the expensive recall, this was a big win for the Intel brand. The early processor years were tumultuous as on the battleground the 486 clones of Cyrix and TI lost. Intel went the Trademark way with the Pentium and the media embraced the incident as something that would sink them.

Although very few people would ever come across the bug, Intel allowed every processor to be exchanged. No matter if you were a gaming consumer or a giant corporation using coprocessor-heavy software.

So I remember a UPS driver coming by my student flat with an exchange processor and picking my faulty unit up a week later or so. It was incredible service that made Intel as a brand very reliable.

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> the media embraced the incident as something that would sink them.

It could have given them a damn good kicking in the consumer retail market and this was new(ish) territory for Intel so they pulled out all the stops to make sure thre was no way it could be made to look like they were trying to fob off the end user.

In reality bugs were present in CPUs all the time in the past, errata were published and libraries & compilets & such were adjusted to avoid the problems with no one making a big fuss - look at the Linux source for remnents of these issues in the x86 line of processors (there were a few in 386/384 era chips, some time after FDIV came the "F00F" bug in the pentium line, and so on). Other chip lines are similarly affected: I remember from my youth tinkering with assembly language there being a bug in some 6502's that meant inirect jumps referencing the last byte of a page would not work as expected.

But the FDIV bug came to attention around the time when CPUs were first being marketted directly at end users rather than PC makers ina big way (as the next phase of the battle you mention in the i486 era), with the man on the street suddenly being aware that they might be able to make the value choice between the alternatives. That is in part why the Pentium line got a name instead of just a code/number (80586, i586, ...): Intel found they couldn't stop people using a number directly in their product names which would have made it harder to differentiate their products from the competition (of course the workaround for this that everyone used was to call their alternative chips "pentium class"). Even ignoring that, a name tends to be much easier for marketing to work with, but I digress... The common consumer had different expectations of how flaws were dealt with and Intel couldn't risk trying to plecate people with "this has happened before, your software will be recompiled and everything will be fine, in fact you are likely not to be affected anyway, stay calm, we've go this" because the masses probably wouldn't take that, especially as Intel's competitors would capitalise on the situation in any way they were given time to, so they instead took the route already common in direct consumer markets: the face saving recall and free replace.

For some "fun" reading, here are the 149 public errata of Haswell CPUs: http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/...

> you are likely not to be affected anyway

True, but the real problem was there was no way to tell if your results were corrupted or not. This made the chip unusable if you had to rely on the results.

There is a story I heard about this, but I can't verify if it is true; though it does come from a professor of the field who could have contacts there at the time.

Internally Intel knew about the bug before release but they dismissed it as minor, despite warnings from a certain engineer. Once the bug got out, Intels' top executives had a meeting on how to avert the disaster. After the meeting where difficult decisions were made (the cost of replacement and marketing to regain the trust of the consumers was huge), this certain engineer went to the CEO and said “I told you”. The CEO answered “You are fired”.

This engineer then went to AMD where he had a key role to AMD K6 and Athlon lines which gave Intel much trouble with their performance.

Maybe the story is fake, but it sounds interesting. :)

That scores pretty much a 10/10 on the urban legend scale.

> Although very few people would ever come across the bug, Intel allowed every processor to be exchanged. No matter if you were a gaming consumer or a giant corporation using coprocessor-heavy software.

Initially they only wanted to exchange CPUs if this bug was likely to significantly affect you. I had to prepare a letter describing our use of AutoCAD to get a replacement CPU ordered. As the media seized on the bug and it became more widely known they revised the policy to update everyone.

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