Intel Skylake/Kaby Lake processors: broken hyper-threading
The problem description is short and scary:<p><i>Problem: Under complex micro-architectural conditions, short loops of less than 64 instructions that use AH, BH, CH or DH registers as well as their corresponding wider register (e.g. RAX, EAX or AX for AH) may cause unpredictable system behavior. This can only happen when both logical processors on the same physical processor are active.</i><p>I wonder how many users have experienced intermittent crashes etc. and just nonchalantly attributed it to something else like &quot;buggy software&quot; or even &quot;cosmic ray&quot;, when it was actually a defect in the hardware. Or more importantly, how many engineers at Intel, working on these processors, saw this happen a few times and did the same.<p>More interestingly, I would love to read an actual detailed analysis of the problem. Was it a software-like bug in microcode e.g. neglecting some edge-case, or a hardware-level race condition related to marginal timing (that could be worked around by e.g. delaying one operation by a cycle or two)? It reminds me of bugs like <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11845770" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11845770</a><p>This and the other rather scary post at <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;danluu.com&#x2F;cpu-bugs&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;danluu.com&#x2F;cpu-bugs&#x2F;</a> suggests to me that CPU manufacturers should do more regression testing, and <i>far more</i> of it. I would recommend demoscene productions, cracktros, and even certain malware, since they tend to exercise the hardware in ways that more &quot;mainstream&quot; software wouldn&#x27;t come close to. ;-)<p>(To those wondering about ARM and other &quot;simpler&quot; SoCs in embedded systems etc.: They have just as much if not more hardware bugs than PCs. We don&#x27;t hear about them often, since they are usually worked around in the software which is usually customised exactly for the application and doesn&#x27;t change much.)