Intel Core Duo CPU Flaw Concerns

[verb]

It seems like first AMD fanboys and now a large chunk of the media is trying to set up the Intel Core Duo as a train wreck of a processor. The latest salvo comes from Geek.com: http://geek.com/news/geeknews/2006Jan/bch20060123034350.htm

While I think of myself being fairly knowledgable about computer architectures and CPUs I haven't done any X86 assembler since college so I can't tell the severity of these issues. Can anyone provide a less sensationalistic view of these issues in more lay terms?

 

[johnnybluejeans]

Every processor has flaws. I don't think think these flaws are being "discovered at an alarming rate", I am sure that most of all these flaws have been carried over from previous generation chips (ie, Pentium M)

AMD chips have plenty of flaws:
http://www.amd.com/us-en/assets/content_type/white_papers_and_tech_docs/25759.pdf

The AMD document can illustrate how some problems are carried from chip to chip, generation after generation.

 

[y0zza]

Nothing to be alarmed about.

There are errata in every modern microprocessor design, and there is no reason for a chip as complex as the Yonah to be any different. AMD's Athlon 64 is currently at 136 known errata, so it's rather blind and ignorant if AMD fanboys are suggesting the number of errata in Yonah to be a 'trainwreck'

The vast majority of these errata will be worked around by microcode or the compiler and will not affect the end user.