Intel Skylake processor error causes computer to freeze during complex calculations

A group of German scientists from the German community of hardwaluxx.de discovered an error in the operation of Intel Skylake processors, causing the computer to freeze in the process of performing complex calculations. Later, mathematics from the voluntary computational project on searching for Mersenne primes ( GIMPS ) confirmed the existence of a problem. The bug manifested itself in the course of searching for Mersenne primes using the Prime95 tool.

Intel representatives also reported an error:
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“Intel discovered a problem that could potentially affect sixth-generation Intel Core products. The error manifests itself only in certain conditions when performing complex calculations when launching applications like Prime95. In such cases, the processor may hang. "

The company has created a patch and is currently working with partners to distribute it using a BIOS update.

The message of the company does not explain the causes of the problem, but it is confirmed that both Linux and Windows systems are susceptible to it.

Prime95 is traditionally used to perform stress tests on computers — it uses the fast Fourier transform to multiply very large numbers. For example, a system crash was detected when working with an exponent of 14,942,209.

Scientists who have found a mistake are considered to be able to manifest it not only in the field of mathematical calculations, but also in other industries that require complex calculations — for example, in the financial industry. At the same time, the GIMPS team notes that their software works “super fine” on Intel computers of previous generations.

Similar errors of work of Intel processors happened before - so, on October 19, 1994, the FDIV bug was discovered in the original Pentium processor. An error in the floating point operations module led to the fact that when dividing over the floating point numbers using the FDIV processor command, the result could be incorrect. This problem had virtually no effect on working with the computer of ordinary users, but the fact that Intel knew about it, but did not plan to fix it just because of the small number of potentially affected users, provoked a serious scandal. As a result, the company had to announce the recall of defective processors and replacing them with working ones correctly.

In addition, not so long ago, the media discussed the errors of hardware support for transactional memory ( Transactional Synchronization Extensions , TSX) of Haswell and Broadwell processors. In this case, instead of recalling faulty processors, the company simply disconnected the TSX instructions using the microcode of the new motherboard firmware.