Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by aristidb 3086 days ago
The very article mentions at the bottom that AMD has its fair share of nasty bugs recently, too. If anything, I would expect AMD to spend even less effort on validation (because they are not flush with cash).
2 comments

Or, because they're not flush with cash, they go for a simpler to verify design.

Remember, a lot of the Zen arch was developed by Jim Keller, who is the brains behind the Athlon 64.

I loved my Athlon 64. IIRC, it ran hot as hell, but the price/performance was amazing.
I remember running two of the AthlonXPs on a Tyan SMP board back in the day. That was before we had multiple cores on a single processor.
What bugs?
The article spends 4 paragraphs on them. Just one example:

    Although AMD’s response in the forum was that these were isolated issues, phoronix was able to
    reproduce crashes by running a stress test that consists of compiling a number of open source
    programs. They report they were able to get 53 segfaults with one hour of attempted compilation.
This is only true with Ryzen CPUs that were manufactured before week 25. ThreadRipper wasn't affected, nor was EPYC.