Microcode, which is a no-go for modern designs

On Sat, 2019-01-05 at 12:00 -0600, cctalk-request at classiccmp.org wrote: I was a tech in the 90's when the original Pentium FDIV bug was storming. The issue was confined to the integrated floating point portion of the processor and was therefore rarely an issue as the vast majority of software did not use the mathco portion of the chip. Only a handful of applications and relative handful of users were affected. This became Intel's position on the matter and they hoped the issue would just die down to those handful whom they would provide new chips. The issue did not die down and the bad press forced the decision to replace ALL pentiums affected. Only a relative few were actually replaced in the home and small business arena. A software patch was a common solution to the problem. It masssaged input to the FDIV instruction to produce a corrected result and worked pretty well as I recall. At the time of the storm, the Pentium was still pretty new and very expensive. Most folks were getting along with AMD k5 and k6 processors. I WAS. I went from k6 to Celeron.

Best Jeff