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Date:      Sun, 9 Nov 1997 14:42:37 -0500 (EST)
From:      "David E. Cross" <dec@phoenix.its.rpi.edu>
To:        Howard Lew <digital@www2.shoppersnet.com>
Cc:        Tony Kimball <alk@subtle.east.sun.com>, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Newest Pentium bug (fatal)
Message-ID:  <Pine.BSF.3.96.971109143948.16069A-100000@phoenix.its.rpi.edu>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.3.91.971108192731.14766A-100000@www2.shoppersnet.com>

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On Sat, 8 Nov 1997, Howard Lew wrote:

> On Sat, 8 Nov 1997, Tony Kimball wrote:
> 
> > ! Compared with the aforementioned
> > ! floating-point bug, this seems like a much bigger deal.
> > 
> > No, the FP bug was infinitely worse, because it would silently give
> > wrong answers.  You could crash the Thai Bhat by accident with an old
> > Pentium chip.  In this case, the machine is locked -- no one is going

The floating point bug could be corrected in software by the OS fairly
easily (in fact it has on windows, not sure about FreeBSD), this
can't to my knowledge, unless you are going to have your OS's check each
opcode before it is executed (for CS people out there that is
O(really-nasty) ;).

my $0.02.

--
David Cross





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