Re: Pentium bug
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg7226] Re: [mg7209] Pentium bug
- From: jpk at max.mpae.gwdg.de
- Date: Sat, 17 May 1997 19:13:13 -0400 (EDT)
- Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com
> From cmorpurgo at mail.utexas.edu Fri May 16 10:03:00 1997 > Date: Fri, 16 May 1997 02:30:48 -0400 (EDT) > From: cmorpurgo at mail.utexas.edu (Carlo Morpurgo) > To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net > Subject: [mg7209] Pentium bug > > Dear all, I am about to buy a Pentium pro 200 - > Recently Intel has admitted bugs in such chips. I wonder > if anyone knows about the possible impacts on Mathematica > computations. > > Thanks, Carlo > My favored computer magazine says that the bug is related to the floating point exceptions of the FPU. Microsofts C Compiler usualy ignore the exceptions completly. Wiht Borland C You can mask the exceptions easily. Probably Mma 3.0 for Windows is compiled with Microsoft C x.x so this does not matter. More over since Mma does Integer arithmetic and a lot of floting point calculation using it's own multiprecission arithmetic I expect no problems. Finaly AMD K6 has the error not and it is at least cheeper to get an AMD chip. Hope that helps Jens