Intel Core i7 Processor also has a TLB bug

Shane

Shane

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Staff member
We were told that Intel's Nehalem, the CPU that we know as Core i7 has TLB. TLB, three letters that have destroyed the sales of Phenom and Opterons based on 65nm K10 cores, stands for Translation Lookaside Buffer, and Intel officialy states in its Intel Core i7 Processor, Extreme Edition Series and Intel Core i7 Processor - Specification Update PDF, that the CPU has a TLB bug.

"In rare instances, improper TLB invalidation may result in unpredictable system behavior, such as system hangs or incorrect data. Developers of operating systems should take this documentation into account when designing TLB invalidation algorithms. For the processors affected, Intel has provided a recommended update to system and BIOS vendors to incorporate into their BIOS to resolve this issue."
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Fudzilla
PDF
Thanks Storm for this article

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intresting news eh :P
 
Oh the irony....there was a lot of questions about such problems happening...considering this would be Intel's first true quad-core.

Still what a chuckle....I wonder how this will play out.
 
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ahh i'll have to wait and see for that bug... after amd had a TLB bug everyone screams as soon as they see those those words and it comes out like intel has some scandal. cpu's do have hundreds of bugs even after a couple of years after the initial release. Most of these bugs can be solved by bios updates though.
 
cpu's do have hundreds of bugs even after a couple of years after the initial release. Most of these bugs can be solved by bios updates though.
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True, but it's the extent of the bug that's "scandalous" here; the TLB errata of early Phenoms wasn't a "minor" bug, it was serious flaw that could well hang an entire server based on those CPUs (=no good) and the performance fix could incur a penalty of about %20 percent. Now, if the TLB bug has hit the i7 that bad, that would almost bring them to the levels of Denebs or current Yorkfields unless you want to risk an unstable system... maybe it ain't so bad for your average user but it's going to be important in server/mainframe scenarios (a market which AMD currently dominates, FYI).
 
Right, The Barcelona/Agena TLB bug bios update hit it pretty hard on performance, plus it was made a bigger deal than it really was because they didnt release the fix till after the processor hit the streets.

Intels bios fix was released to motherboard makers before the processor was. So who knows how much of a problem it was or how much performance was hit, since nobody ran one without the fix to start with.
 
well, for one its fud, and two seems to me i've seen other threads on other forums, saying that the i7 doesn't really have that bug
 
Respital said:
Looks like i mite be getting a Phenom II instead of an i7.
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Why ?

Intel released bios update which fixed the bug thats before i7 was even out

SPEC CLARIFICATION AAJ1 was initially added due to an issue on the Intel® Core 2 Duo processor which was previously corrected with a BIOS update; this issue does not impact the Nehalem Family of CPUs. There are errata on the Intel® Core i7 processor that relate to the TLB. These all relate to improper translations or error reporting, and all of those that impact functionality have been fixed via BIOS updates prior to Core i7 launch.
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Source
http://techreport.com/discussions.x/15979
 
hackapelite said:
True, but it's the extent of the bug that's "scandalous" here; the TLB errata of early Phenoms wasn't a "minor" bug, it was serious flaw that could well hang an entire server based on those CPUs (=no good) and the performance fix could incur a penalty of about %20 percent. Now, if the TLB bug has hit the i7 that bad, that would almost bring them to the levels of Denebs or current Yorkfields unless you want to risk an unstable system... maybe it ain't so bad for your average user but it's going to be important in server/mainframe scenarios (a market which AMD currently dominates, FYI).
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it's not THE tlb bug it's A tlb bug. it doesn't have to be a serious flaw. It could just as well be one of the hundreds.
 
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