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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