Intel are really screwing up by the numbers. I wouldn't want to buy a Coppermine any time in the near future. Let's see - so you want to buy a coppermine CPU? Good luck to you:If you can actually *find* one of the damn things (no mean feat in itself!), then...
If you can get an i820 motherboard (the rambus version - the SDRAM version with the MTH is SH!T), then...
If you can afford rambus RIMMS to populate that board, then (you've got too much cash sitting about! )...
If your coppermine will boot up when you power it up (Intel obviously didn't think this was too important, so they didn't test it too well!), then you'll be treated to...
FDIV bug 2 - son of FDIV. From Intel's CPU errata (they're not bugs, honest guv'nor) list:
"E56. It is possible that a negative sign bit may be incorrectly applied to the result of an x87 floating point operation if it is closely preceded by a Streaming SIMD Extensions (SSE) multiply operation...
...Implication: If this erratum occurs, the result of an x87 floating point instruction which should be positive will instead be negative."
Jeez. Yet *another* Pentium that can't do its sums. My first Pentium was one of the P66's that had the original FDIV bug.
I bet AMD are totally gutting themselves with laughter right about now... 
posted 12-09-1999 08:08 AM
