Opterons sink over floating point problems

Up to 3,000 AMD chips may be affected by a 'post-manufacturing' problem

AMD has admitted to a problem with a limited number of single-core Opteron x52s and x54s, which results in inconsistent calculations when running floating point intensive code sequences.

Reports suggest that up to 3,000 chips may be affected. The chip firm has set up hotlines to take questions from customers concerned that they may be affected by the bug.

AMD has developed a test to identify the faulty chips and will replace the units free of charge.

The firm has acknowledged a "test escape that occurred in our post-manufacturing product testing process for a limited number of single-core AMD Opteron processor models x52 and x54".

AMD insisted that no other single-core AMD Opteron processors, and no dual-core AMD Opteron processors, are affected.

"A small number of these processors manufactured in 2005 and early 2006 have been observed to produce inconsistent results in a non-production synthetic test environment with the convergence of three simultaneous conditions," said AMD.

These three simultaneous conditions are: the running of floating point intensive code sequences; elevated CPU temperatures; and elevated ambient temperatures.

These conditions would most likely be encountered in web servers, application servers, transaction processing servers, database servers or file print servers.

Full details of the glitch, and contact details for AMD, are available from the AMD website.