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Ken Shirriff Tracks Down Intel's Infamous Pentium FDIV Bug in the Silicon Itself
"I can confirm [the flaw] in silicon," Shirriff writes — having tracked down the PLA block responsible for a half-billion-dollar recall.
Noted reverse engineer and vintage electronics enthusiast Ken Shirriff has turned his attention to one of the darkest days in Intel's storied history: the discovery of, and subsequent impact of, the infamous FDIV bug in its Pentium processor range. Intel's Pentium processors, the first to receive a copyrightable name in place of the easily-cloned numerical nomenclature that had been used for the 80486 and its predecessors, was a smash-hit for the company, delivering a serious performance uplift. These entries, Shirriff explains, were stored in a programmable logic array (PLA) on the chip itself — visible in high-resolution photography of an unencapsulated Pentium processor die.
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