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Watch Your Step(ping): Atoms Breaking Apart
- nneonneo 5y agoThis is a bug in certain Atom processors, fixed in a microcode update. The errata states: > Under complex microarchitectural conditions, incorrect instruction bytes may be used for code with linear addresses bits 5:4 = 10b. That is, code at addresses ending in hex 2x, 6x, Ax or Ex might randomly get substituted with other code. Pretty spooky - the bug basically causes the CPU to occasionally go off and execute totally incorrect instructions, often resulting in a crash. The scarier problem is that the bug might not always wind up crashing - maybe it just runs the wrong instruction and produces the wrong result…