Intel Core Duo Riddled With Bugs?
Intel’s new Core Duo processor has 34 known problems, the company admits.
The chip giant has published an errata document on it’s website here listing each of the problems. The discovery was made by Geek.com, which sifted through the errors and gave each of them a rating, from “show stopper” to “potentially catastrophic” (Shown Here). Possible impacts of the bugs include performance degradation, inability to wake up from sleep in some situations (because the machine references the wrong part of the memory) and the potential for the system to crash due to incorrect readings from the CPU heat sensor. At the time of writing, Intel said that only planned to fix one of the 34 problems – the heat sensor issue.
There are 65 known errors in the venerable Pentium 4 as well, and AMD has an 85 page document on the errors in the Opteron series (PDF Here), and we’ve all been using those chips none the wiser. Intel says fears of Core Duo chip faults are a storm in a teacup.
“We assess how to handle various errata based on a variety of criteria,” said Intel’s Dan Anderson “…all of this is handled in a very public way via our spec update public web site. Intel has been following this process for many years now and sets the standard for this kind of issue management in the semiconductor industry.”
Don’t cancel your Core Duo notebook order just yet!!!
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