[forgotusername]

It's interesting how with significantly worse (or at the very least, comparable) complexity to manage, and uniformly horrific costs for repairing production bugs, the ASIC design industry and Intel/AMD in particular have managed to scrape by with something like <20 bugs between them in the past decade.

Perhaps we need to incentivize software developers with fear of execution, or something.

[wmf]

A recent x86 processor model has at least 20 "errata" that they'll tell you about; in the last decade they must have had hundreds. But most of them are just worked around so they don't affect you.

[Tuna-Fish]

Modern x86 CPUs can trap arbitrary instructions to microcode. This means that most hardware bugs can be fixed with a firmware update that just slows down the cpu somewhat when it encounters the offending instruction.

There certainly are a lot of hardware bugs in cpus -- it's just that most of them get fixed before anyone outside the cpu company ever sees them.

[sdbbp]

The amount of effort spent on what is generally called "functional verification" is much higher for hardware than for software. Also, the specifications tend to be clearer and the source code size is smaller than you might imagine.