Microcode, which is a no-go for modern designs

[Jeffrey S. Worley]

On Sun, 2019-01-06 at 11:08 -0800, Josh Dersch wrote:
> That's a good trick, given that the K5 came out in 1996 and the K6 in
> 1997, the FDIV issue blew up in late 1994.

Memory is like that.  The FDIV bug didn't go away because it was
announced, the chips stayed on desktops and our diagnostic software
frequently contained the FDIV patch to deal with such, for the rest of
the decade.

I went from a 486dlc-40 to a 4x86 dx2 80 to a k5 133 to a k6 to a k6 to
a k6 to a celeron.  Amd kept releasing faster k6's. My last, in the
late 90's, was IIRC a 333mhz model.

I was a tech in Miami at the time FDIV happened, working for Victors
DataSouth and it's Novell networks.  My servers ran 486's but we sold
Pentiums and it was a real hassle to have to field all those beefs from
customers whose EXPENSIVE processors couldn't divide accurately.

In 95' I went to work in Asheville, NC for Uptime Computer Services and
saw a bunch of machines cross my desk which needed the software patch.

In 2000 I was working with Bits and Bytes computer services.


Best,

Jeff