Remember the famous floating point Pentium bug which cost poor old Intel Corp so much money and grief back in 1994? Well it’s happening all over again with the Pentium II, and this time before the chip has actually made it out of the door. Robert Collins, who runs the Intel Secrets Web site, has posted up details of what he calls a bug in the floating point integer store of the new chip, details of which can be found at http://www.x86.org/. Not willing to dismiss it out of hand as it did last time, Intel is playing for time. At the European launch of Pentium II last night, the company says it first heard of the bug on the web last week, but was unable to get real information until Monday. It says by the end of the week it will have the problem fully characterized and will make public any errata, if that is required – as is it’s normal procedure.
