...Pentium Flaw The Pentium Microprocessor is the widest selling personal computers on the market. Intel created the 486DX and the Pentium chip that included Floating point unit (FPU). This FPU was known as a math co-processor. The problem arose in the fall of 1994, all the new Pentium chips were manufactured with an error in the FPU system. This error was in the FPU instructions for the division. This caused the chip to divide certain numbers incorrectly. Intel engineers discovered a flaw in the floating-point math subsection of the Pentium processor. But instead of assessing this problem they simply ignored it and thought that the customers would not ever notice the flaw. Thomas Nicely discovered this problem also when he was computing the sum of large reciprocals of prime numbers on his Pentium base computer. Later on Thomas emailed Intel and told them that there was a flaw in the co-processor. Intel never responded back so he took it to his own hands and posted the flaw online, asking other people to check for the flaw also on other users computers. Many people responded back and the news got involved sooner or later Intel started receiving more and more emails about the flaw. A common Known error was 4195825/3145727 dividing those numbers gave an incorrect answer to the problem. Intel’s response to this flaw was to replace Pentium chip microprocessor to whoever could explain the flaw to them. This angered man of the customers so Intel responded by replacing them...
Words: 410 - Pages: 2
...Name: Ebere Uguru Student ID: 16389756 Course: NT1110T Computer Structure and Logic Unit 5 Analysis THE FLAW IN THE INTEL PROCESSOR CHIP Since computer evolution, various computer companies have made their marks on the shores of revolutionizing computer as we know it. Hence, Intel, one of the world’s computer company giants, is not an exception to the zeal of making computers more efficient as the world evolves with time. However in 1994, Intel was hit by a major setback related to a flaw in its P5 Pentium Floating Point Unit (FPU) rolled out that year. This defect was first discovered by Professor Thomas R. Nicely, a professor of Mathematics at Lynchburg College in Virginia. According to the chronology, Professor Nicely in his quest to perfecting codes to enumerate primes, twin primes, and prime quadruplets unraveled the incoherence in his calculation. This abnormally occurred only after he had added a collection of computers manufactured by Intel to his group of computers. At first, he was unable to eliminate this flaw due to other factors such as: motherboard, programming errors and chiplets. After series of attempts to bring the attention of Intel to this error proved abortive, Professor Nicely then went public with it, and his claim was concurred by other internet users using Intel computers. Out of concern for the ripple effects of admitting to this error as it is, Intel...
Words: 872 - Pages: 4
...Pentium Flaw The Pentium Flaw, also known as the Pentium FDIV bug, was a bug located in the FPU, and certain floating point division operations performed would produce incorrect results, which includes decimals, addition and subtraction. These are mostly used in math and some science work. Intel was heavily criticized for the flaw, and the handling of this flaw, which caused them to recall every one of the processors. Dr. Thomas Nicely discovered the bug in 1994. After emailing Intel and receiving no response, Dr. Nicely went ahead and posted a message on the internet. Word of the bug quickly spread to industry press. Intel responded by saying it was a minor issue, this was not accepted by computer users. Intel later changed its position and offered to replace every chip, which resulted in a $500 million dollar loss for the company. This also actually propelled the company from being a tech supplier to now becoming a house hold name. Next, they in turn used the negative publicity to change business practices and become an overall better company. The Pentium Flaw made Intel into the most successful processor making company that it is today. Intel achieved a position of dominance in the market as a supplier. While the Pentium Flaw hurt the company short term, it actually helped the company in the long run. Gaining popularity and ensuring consistency within its products. Without the Pentium Flaw no one knows if Intel would be as successful as they are today, or if any of...
Words: 266 - Pages: 2
...Tiffany M Shamlee Unit 5 Analysis 1 NT1110 Pentium Flaw The Pentium flaw was discovered where the division result returned by the Pentium microprocessor was off by about sixty-one parts per million. When Intel discovered the flaw, their solution was to keep the information within the company. They did not want to disclose any of the information to the public, because of the negative publicity it would bring to the company. The flaw did not affect all microprocessors, only a very small number of customers. I feel that Intel should have openly acknowledged the problem despite the small number of customers affected. Intel determined if customers were affected by the flaw when they called in to report a problem. They did this by inputting a certain code into their system. Once they identified the problem, Intel would then implement a solution. However, if feel if Intel had openly accepted and informed the clients about the issue, it would have most likely saved them money. Their reputation between the company and their existing clients would have also been protected. Intel’s decision and way of handling the flaw caused a lot of their customers to be very unhappy. If this type of flaw was to be found in a new CPU today, the company would surely fail. With a problem in the floating-point math subsection with an error of approximately sixty-one parts per million, this would cause too many problems for the clients today. Especially considering that Intel declined...
Words: 310 - Pages: 2
...Pentium Flaw The Pentium flaw was a bug within the Pentium CPU’s 3.1 million transistors that caused the transistors to perform division incorrectly. Intel’s engineers discovered the flaw after the product’s release in 1993 but chose to keep silent and attempt to correct the flaw in future updates to the processor chip. The flaw was discovered in 1994 by American mathematician Thomas Nicely. Nicely was using a personal computer equipped with Intel’s Pentium chip when he discovered a flaw in the chip that was producing inconsistent results in his calculations of Brun’s constant. Nicely informed Intel of the flaw, but after receiving no response he posted his finding on the internet. News of the bug spread quickly on the internet and then to the industry press. Intel’s statement that the bug was minor was not accepted by many computer users. After a spotlight of the flaw ran by The New York Times, Intel changed its postion and offered to replace every chip. Only a fraction of Pentium users bothered to have their chips replaced. I believe Intel handled the situation in a professional manner and gave customers reasonable options to have their chips replaced. I do not think the flaw in the chip affected most customers and had little effect to the common user. If the flaw was a major problem more people would have had issues and more chips would have been replaced. Intel did everything necessary to satisfy their customers. I believe if the same situation was to occur today...
Words: 305 - Pages: 2
...Collin Pannell Warwick NT 1110 October 22, 2013 The Pentium Flaw During the year of 1994 one of Intel’s processors called the Pentium microprocessor chip had a small flaw inside the chip. These Pentium processors included something new called a floating-point unit, which is also know as a math coprocessor. These Pentium processors had this floating-point unit built into the processors, which makes them much faster. These chips that were made had errors on the floating-point unit that corrupted instructions for division. This cased the Floating-point unit to divide certain floating-point numbers incorrectly. This Pentium flaw was most know from an equation solved by Tim Coe of Vitesse Semiconductors. The number he tried to divide was 4195835 by 3145727. The value that was outputted by the computer was incorrect by 0.006%. Thomas Nicely, a math professor at Lynchburg College was computing the sum of the reciprocals of a large collection of prime numbers on one of Intel’s Pentium-based computers. He calculated the same equation on a different program and then traced the problem back to the Pentium itself. Nicely contacted Intel and didn’t get any real response to the problem. He then posted on the Internet asking others to confirm the problem he had found. Nicely was interviewed with a magazine and CNN aired a story about by his findings. After Nicely’s findings, Intel publicly announced “an error is only likely to occur [about] once in nine billion random floating...
Words: 462 - Pages: 2
...The Intel Pentium microprocessor had a design flaw in the mathematical division groupings. An internet blog site states, “Under certain data dependent conditions, low order bits of the result of floating-point division operations would be incorrect, an error that can compound in floating-point operations to much larger errors in subsequent calculations” (http://intelcorporation4uinfo.blogspot.com/2008/12/pentium-flaw.html). Due to not receiving a response from Intel on his findings, Professor Thomas Nicely from Lynchburg College, posted his findings on the internet on October 30, 1994. Nicely quoted that “he was computing the sum of the reciprocals of a large collection of prime numbers on his Pentium-based computer and found the error. Checking his computation, he found the result differed significantly from theoretical values. He got correct results by running the same program on a computer with a 486 CPU, and finally he tracked the error to the Pentium itself” (Janeba.Mark.The Pentium Problem.1995). News of calculations error spread like a wildfire. Intel publicly announced that "an error is only likely to occur [about] once in nine billion random floating point divide situations”. This did not sit very well with companies and individuals alike. The Food and Drug Administration stated its concerns for the drug-testing data that had been produced using the Pentium processor. They did not tell the companies to redo all their testing, but firmly represented hesitation in...
Words: 674 - Pages: 3
...arithmetic-logic unit, and the control unit. The CPU is connected to the other various equipment is the computer system which include input/output devices, storage units and other peripheral equipment. Essentially the CPU is the brains of a computers system. In 1968 Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce created the company giant, Intel which is now the largest CPU manufacturer in the world. In 1993 Intel introduced the Pentium series CPU. The Pentium architecture became the most successful processor of all time. As successful as the Pentium was it had issues. Most can and could not be seen by the typical user but in 1994 it had a flaw that was noticed by a mathematician from Lynchburg collage in West Virginia by the name of Thomas Nicely while doing some calculations on his PC. The Pentium flaw was the flaw in the Float-point unit would cause incorrect answers when preforming double precision arithmetic, which is a common operation. Intel’s first response to the problem was to deny that the problem did not exist. Then would later acknowledge the flaw. However state that the flaw was insignificant and most users would not notice. Intel would replace the defected processor if a user could demonstrate the need for a processor that was not flawed. After IBM cancelled sales of its computers that had the flawed processer in it and lots of negative publicity Intel replaced the flawed processor with an unflawed processor to any customer who asked for it. In conclusion I believe...
Words: 402 - Pages: 2
...Analysis 1: Pentium Flaw Intel Corporation discovered a design flaw in June of 1994 in its flagship Pentium Processor. For divisions involving a few specific numbers, the chip's floating point unit gave the wrong answer. Intel's tests showed that the error only appeared in the ninth significant digit of the answer and affected only a minuscule percentage of the possible division combinations. Intel did not handle the problem correctly, they consider the flaw to be “minor” .They said that it wasn’t the first time a flaw of this nature happened so Intel continued to sell hundreds of thousands of chips that were already made. Intel pretty much ignored the flaw and did nothing to satisfy its consumer. Dr. Thomas contacted Intel’s technical support in October of the same year and had no luck, so he decided to post the problem in a blog, which brought immediate attention to Intel. At the beginning Intel said that that they will only replace the flawed chip only for those users that work with heavy duty scientific/floating point calculations since the problem did not affected everyone else using simple mathematics. Later that year after the increased coverage by worldwide print and electronic media, Intel fear and decided to recall the chip on December 20, 1994. Intel decided to offer a replacement chip to all of its end-users—"no questions asked." Intel took a $475 million loss for the replacement program. In today’s society I think it would be mostly impossible for a flaw to happen...
Words: 353 - Pages: 2
...Intel’s famed technical prowess was not without mishaps. Its greatest mistake was the so-called “Pentium flaw,” in which an obscure segment among the Pentium CPU’s 3.1 million transistors performed division incorrectly. Company engineers discovered the problem after the product’s release in 1993 but decided to keep quiet and fix the problem in updates to the chip. However, In 1994 American mathematician Thomas Nicely was using a personal computer equipped with the then new Pentium chip from the Intel Corporation when he discovered a flaw in the chip that was producing inconsistent results in his calculations of Brun’s constant. Negative publicity from the mathematics community led Intel to offer free replacement chips that cost them millions of dollars in revenue. My analysis of the way the Intel Corporation handled the Pentium flaw of the 90's was irresponsible. They seemed to basically dismiss that there would be noticeable problems that could affect the user with their computer. Although in most cases this assumption is correct, it still shows a great deal of dishonestly from the company because it seemed as if Intel tried to cover it up. I feel that Intel was lazy and simply not willing to fix the problem that they created due to cost concerns. If I were to sell a bicycle to someone knowing the breaks were faulty, causing occasional break failure, I think people would be pretty upset and I would most likely be sued for sub sequential harm caused. On December 20, 1994,...
Words: 371 - Pages: 2
...PENTIUM FLAW By Michael Carreathers Facts The “Pentium Flaw” was discovered June nineteenth nineteen nighty four by Professor Thomas Nicely. Basically Thomas was adding a Pentium system to some computers when he noticed some calculations were wrong. He then contacted Intel and told them about the problem. Ironically the person he contacted at Intel already knew about the problem but never said anything. He then contacted people to see if they were also having the same problem. After a couple days Thomas wasn’t the only person who realized there was a problem. People around the world who had access to the internet found this out. The diversion result from Pentium was off by sixty one parts per million. Intel then was forced to tell people about this hiccup but said that it was of little importance and that it wouldn’t affect most people in a big way. Even though this was most likely true it made everyone feel like they messed up and nobody wants something that doesn’t work how it’s supposed to even if it’s off a little. Intel then felt the need to tell customers that if there Pentium chip was flawed in any way they would replace it with Pentium chips that were flawless. Not a lot of people even bothered to replace their chips at all. In, nineteen nighty five Intel had to pay four hundred seventy five million because of the flawed processors. My Opinion My opinion on the “Pentium Flaw” is that it is a complete outrage. I feel personally that I love electronics and everyone...
Words: 374 - Pages: 2
...Pentium Flaw The nature of the Pentium flaw was a “bug” that the processor could return incorrect decimal results which made this hard to calculate and get the correct answer. This affected the fields in mathematics and science where they have to deal with a lot of math. The flaw was discovered first by Intel but they did not act on the problem, but a professor from Lynchburg College, Virginia called Dr. Thomas R. Nicely discovered the problem around June 1994 he was the one that noticed it in two sets of numbers and did some tests on 486 and Pentium-based computers, Dr. Nicely was certain that the error is caused by the Pentium Processor. Dr. Nicely then contacts Intel Technical Support on October 24, 1994 Intel technical support then duplicates the problem and confirms it, but it was not reported before. Later the Intel person he had contacted admitted that Intel had been aware of the problem since May 1994, when the flaw was discovered by Tom Kraljevic. When Intel first knew about the problem they decided not to tell anyone, thinking that the flaw would hardly affect anyone and that it was just a commonplace for a complex microprocessor to have a few bugs. Then, when it was forced to acknowledge the problem, Intel pushed it away again and dismissed the chances of it causing problems for the average user. In my opinion, Intel was acting very unprofessional when they knew about the problems and did nothing to fix the problem. I think that Intel was just trying to save money...
Words: 604 - Pages: 3
...College discovered a flaw with the new Intel Pentium processor while he was trying to perform calculations. He had noticed that the answers to his calculations were coming back wrong. One example of the flaw was found where the division result returned by the Pentium was off by about 61 parts per million. He initially contacted Intel in which he would find out later that they were aware that there was a problem. At first Intel denied there being a problem but after several reports they said that there was a problem but it was so minor that most computer users wouldn’t notice it. Intel then told its customers that if they could prove that they received a defective chip then they would replace it for free. IBM, who used the Pentium in their computers, cancelled their sales of their computers that had the flawed chip. But finally after a lot of negative press and decreasing sales, Intel finally decided to replace all the flawed chips. It seems to me that at first Intel did a horrible job of addressing the issue. Ii seemed as if they wanted to hide the problem because they didn’t want it to affect their profit margins. It also seemed that they were worried about losing their customer base over the issue. But in the end they seemed to have admitted their fault and tried to do the right thing and replace the defective chips. I would hope and imagine that any company, including Intel, would try to be more proactive in the future if they were to encounter any flaws in their products....
Words: 302 - Pages: 2
...Intel greatest mistake was the so-called “Pentium Flaw,” in which an obscure segment among the Pentium CPU’s 3.1 million transistors performed division incorrectly. In 1994 American mathematician Thomas Nicely was using a personal computer equipped with the then new Pentium chip from the Intel Corporation when he discovered a flaw in the chip that was producing inconsistent results. Intel isolated their flaw, so their solution was to keep the information within the company and not disclose the information to the public. Despite of the fact that the flaw did not affect all microprocessors, it actually only affected a very small number of customers, Intel should have openly acknowledged the problem. Later, after no responses Dr. Nicely answered back by on the internet which caused an uproar and everyone was informed quickly. This when Intel pronounce that there is a problem and that they would replace any of the malfunctioning and damage chips. Intel had to put aside $500,000,000 of the 1994 revenue just to be capable of replacing the processor that where bad. Nonetheless, if Intel had willingly acknowledge and informed the customers and businesses partners about the issue, it most likely would have saved them not only money but also their reputation between the company and their existing clients. Needless to say, their decision resulted in some very unhappy customers. If this same problem would have happen these days, the CPU Company would have collapse before it would have started...
Words: 298 - Pages: 2
...The Pentium Flaw The Pentium Flaw is a prime example of what happens when a company ignores the users they sell their product to. The Flaw was in the 486DX processor chip, with the Floating point unit. The error in the unit would occur very rarely, when dividing non-integers. Intel’s testers knew of this issue before it was released, but they decided not to tell anyone outside of the company, this was their first and largest mistake. After the release of the chip, it was several months before Dr. Thomas Nicely noticed the flaw. He conducted several tests on multiple computers and processor units before he was convinced of the flaw and decided to alert Intel of what he had discovered. Dr. Nicely contacted Intel technical support, who ran his test and confirmed the flaw, however said that the issue had not been reported before. After six days, Dr. Nicely had heard nothing back from Intel; he then emailed a few people about this bug. It took less than two weeks for things to get out of control for Intel; already their stock had dropped a little more than a dollar. Intel initially ignored this problem, and when they did acknowledge it, it was much too late. The internet was chaotic with unhappy customers and newsgroups hoping to get a good scoop. It wasn’t until November 24th that Intel had offered their first Offer to effected customers. This offer was insignificant; to only replace the chips when a person could prove they needed absolute accuracy in their use of the computer...
Words: 477 - Pages: 2
