The FDIV bug was an oddity in part because of when it happened. It was the first significant bug not fixable by microcode update or similar in the first Intel chip to be marketed directly at the end user.<p>Marketing&#x2F;PR was a key factor: public awareness was high, public understanding was low, and the press had a field day showing examples of the bug affecting popular spreadsheet applications. Prior to the Pentium line, CPUs were something only techie users like us were more than casually aware of - to everyone else they were just a part in an appliance and bugs like this would have been blamed on the software (for which there would be an update to work around the bug which would cement the opinion the software was the source of the problem).<p>Traditionally kernels and compilers would be reissued with a work-around (and software affected by a complier change patched) and people who were significantly affected (number crunchers for who the workaround massively affected performance in this case) might get a replacement if they bought direct from Intel. Home and office users would be pretty much unaware of this happening. There were a number of bugs in x86 chips prior to this that were handled that way (see the list of bugs the Linux kernel checks for on startup like &quot;FOOF&quot; and so forth). Obviously this isn&#x27;t just an Intel thing, I expect all significant processor lines have had bugs. I remember some machine code I&#x27;d badly crafted being affected by a bug in some variants of the 6502 so it would work on some BBCs&#x2F;compatible but not all (I forget the exact details but it was something about jumps from locations at the last byte of a page, the workaround was easy: pad the location or to use the mallet instead of a more precise tool and 16-bit align <i>everything</i>).