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There's always a wrong answer

How I found a bug in Intel Skylake processors

7 years ago
Anonymous $5Xj9GxNz_j 3

http://gallium.inria.fr/blog/intel-skylake-bug/

Instructors of "Introduction to programming" courses know that students are willing to blame the failures of their programs on anything. Sorting routine discards half of the data? "That might be a Windows virus!" Binary search always fails? "The Java compiler is acting funny today!" More experienced programmers know very well that the bug is generally in their code: occasionally in third-party libraries; very rarely in system libraries; exceedingly rarely in the compiler; and never in the processor. That's what I thought too, until recently. Here is how I ran into a bug in Intel Skylake processors while trying to debug mysterious OCaml failures.