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It's been 30 years since Intel's infamous Pentium FDIV bug reared its ugly head


What’s worse, wrong math or dead chips?

Because only five of the 1,066 populated cells had the wrong value, floating point division calculations were usually correct until at least the fourth digit, which is perhaps why the bug went unnoticed for over a year. Eventually, math professor Thomas Nicely at Lynchburg College discovered the bug, running calculations on multiple computers, one of which used a Pentium. This time around, Intel didn’t need to recall all Raptor Lake CPUs, but it has replaced all chips damaged by the elevated voltage bug.

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