[A somewhat dubious channel has gotten this message to me. It purports
to be an internal memo from Intel, but it may not actually be for real.
This is not specifically firewalls related, but I'm hoping to quell some
of the cross talk on this list. Check out comp.sys.intel for further info.]
---- Begin Forwarded Message
This is Andy Grove, president of Intel. I'd like to comment a bit on
the conversations that have been taking place here.
First of all, I am truly sorry for the anxiety created among you by
our floating point issue. I read thru some of the postings and it's
clear that many of you have done a lot of work around it and that some
of you are very angry at us.
Let me give you my perspective on what has happened here.
The Pentium processor was introduced into the market in May of '93
after the most extensive testing program we at Intel have ever
embarked on. Because this chip is three times as complex as the 486,
and because it includes a number of improved floating point
algorithms, we geared up to do an array of tests, validation, and
verification that far exceeded anything we had ever done. So did many
of our OEM customers. We held the introduction of the chip several
months in order to give them more time to check out the chip and their
systems. We worked extensively with many software companies to this
end as well.
We were very pleased with the result. We ramped the processor faster
than any other in our history and encountered no significant problems
in the user community. Not that the chip was perfect; no chip ever
is. From time to time, we gathered up what problems we found and put
into production a new "stepping"-- a new set of masks that
incorporated whatever we corrected. Stepping N was better than
stepping N minus 1, which was better than stepping N minus 2. After
almost 25 years in the microprocessor business, I have come to the the
conclusion that no microprocessor is ever perfect; they just come
closer to perfection with each stepping. In the life of a typical
microprocessor, we go thru half a dozen or more such steppings.
Then, in the summer of '94, in the process of further testing (which
continued thru all this time and continues today), we came upon the
floating point error. We were puzzled as to why neither we nor anyone
else had encountered this earlier. We started a separate project,
including mathematicians and scientists who work for us in areas other
than the Pentium processor group to examine the nature of the problem
and its impact.
This group concluded after months of work that (1) an error is only
likely to occur at a frequency of the order of once in nine billion
random floating point divides, and that (2) this many divides in all
the programs they evaluated (which included many scientific programs)
would require elapsed times of use that would be longer than the mean
time to failure of the physical computer subsystems. In other words,
the error rate a user might see due to the floating point problem
would be swamped by other known computer failure mechanisms. This
explained why nobody -- not us, not our OEM customers, not the
software vendors we worked with and not the many individual users --
had run into it.
As some of you may recall, we had encountered thornier problems with
early versions of the 386 and 486, so we breathed a sigh of relief
that with the Pentium processor we had found what turned out to be a
problem of far lesser magnitude. We then incorporated the fix into
the next stepping of both the 60 and 66 and the 75/90/100 MHz Pentium
processor along with whatever else we were correcting in that next
stepping.
Then, last month Professor Nicely posted his observations about this
problem and the hubbub started. Interestingly, I understand from
press reports that Prof. Nicely was attempting to show that
Pentium-based computers can do the jobs of big time supercomputers in
numbers analyses. Many of you who posted comments are evidently also
involved in pretty heavy duty mathematical work.
That gets us to the present time and what we do about all this.
We would like to find all users of the Pentium processor who are
engaged in work involving heavy duty scientific/floating point
calculations and resolve their problem in the most appropriate fashion
including, if necessary, by replacing their chips with new ones. We
don't know how to set precise rules on this so we decided to do it
thru individual discussions between each of you and a technically
trained Intel person. We set up 800# lines for that purpose. It is
going to take us time to work thru the calls we are getting, but we
will work thru them. I would like to ask for your patience here.
Meanwhile, please don't be concerned that the passing of time will
deprive you of the opportunity to get your problem resolved -- we will
stand behind these chips for the life of your computer.
Sorry to be so long-winded -- and again please accept my apologies for
the situation. We appreciate your interest in the Pentium processor,
and we remain dedicated to bringing it as close to perfection as
possible.
I will monitor your communications in the future -- forgive me if I
can't answer each of you individually.
Andy Grove
---- End Forwarded Message
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