A Floating Point Unit Flaw in Intel's Pentium Microprocessors
In June, 1994 the media came out with a story that one of Intel’s Pentium microprocessors had a floating point unit flaw (FPU). This flaw had to do with a math calculation that gave out wrong number after you put in an equation. The story about this flaw came to light after Professor by the name of Thomas Nicely, who was a mathematics professor at Lynchburg collage. Nicely was trying to compute the sum of a reciprocal of a large group of prime numbers on his Pentium based computer. When he checked the results they were different by a large amount from the theoretical values. By running the same test program on a different computer with a 486CPU, he came up with the right numbers this lead him to be able to track down the error to the Pentium itself. After finding the problem Nicely send out an email to Intel describing the problem that he had come across in his test. The email stated that there was a flaw in the Pentium floating point unit (FPU). With no response back from Intel Nicely posted a general notice on the internet asking people to confirm his findings. When the media got wind of this story Nicely did some magazine and T.V interviews about what his test resolute showed him. The flaw in the Pentium flaw was not an isolated incident the flaw was quickly verified by other people around the world in the scientific community, which became referred to as the Pentium FDIV bug. When the story first broke Intel’s initial response was to deny that there was a kind of a problem with there chips. But as the information got out on the internet the public wanted action to be taken. So Intel had to retract there statement that there was nothing wrong, to stating that although there was indeed a flaw in its chips, the defect was so insignificant to the majority of users. The average user would never even notice a problem in the flawed chip and that an error is only likely to occur once in ever nine billion random floating point divide that an average spread sheet user