Don’t panic just yet. Many of the known flaws go back as far as 1995. To make you AMD users feel better, the older Athlon 64 chip has 169 known bugs. So should we consumers be concerned? Not really. “Errata” or known bugs are nothing new and for the most part can be ignored by the casual computer user. It has been shown that conditions must be perfect before the known bugs cause a problem and many of these problems can only be duplicated in laboratory environments.

In a article I just read, the author states:

Errata range in scope from completely innocuous quirks to full-on system crashes and corrupted data. Of the 105 errata currently listed by Intel, only 4 have already been fixed in hardware. These fixes shipped in the most recent L2 stepping. Anyone with the previous B2 or B3 steppings will still have those errata. Only 32 of the 105 are planned to be fixed at some point in the future. That leaves 69 errata which Intel does not currently have any plans to fix. Some of those do have software workarounds and are not, therefore, considered as a requirement to fix in hardware.

The concerns many analysts and consumers have with this most recent microcode update are that the Intel chips are in some way flawed to the point where corruption is imminent for the user. While this is true under the conditions in which the errata surface, the truth is that many operating systems and compilers have, for a long time, included code which knows how to deal with these kinds of annoying quirks.

Still, there is not a CPU in existence that does not have some kind of errata. And the average user running at at-home operating systems and software, doing mostly at-home things, will never see any kind of significant problems due to any errata which might happen to exist. In fact, it is far more likely that real software errors in the OS or applications will cause far more errors than would a faulty CPU.

Even for extreme users, those who max out their system’s memory and have custom developed software, the errata almost always have a workaround. If the software developer took the time to code their specialty software with those workarounds, then it is unlikely any real errata issue would crop up and cause failures due to hardware. In fact, it’s very rare.

So relax. Checking email, surfing the web, playing a few games, or typing a letter will have little affect on your computer enjoyment, since these flaws and quirks are well hidden from us. But for those who use their computers in a business environment, you may wish to keep this information in mind when your boss tries to chew you out for a mistake you made. You can now say with confidence that it was the computers fault!

Full story here.

Comments welcome.

[tags]intel, amd, cpu, flaws, quirks, errata, [/tags]