There’s no panic, Compaq Computer Corp chief executive Eckhard Pfeiffer told the Technologic event: I don’t think there is any reason for a general product recall, but if the customer is worried, this is something to fix immediately; Compaq’s interim solution is to disable the maths co-processor and execute the arithmetic functions more slowly in software on the main processor – effectively turning the chip into a Pentium SX on the 80486 – but not the 80386 – model; for anyone worried, this is probably the least bad solution, since there are now suggestions that even if software is used to work around the offending FDIV function on the chip, some Pentium transcendental functions – your sines and cosines and tangents – still use FDIV internally, which could leave power users in a false state of security.
