| HN Mirror

Bob Colwell touches on an issue that sounds like it is this one in his talk Engineering Lessons from the Pittsburgh Steelers [1] at around 1:05:02 (link prepositioned). I'll bet that he went into more detail in his book The Pentium Chronicles, but I don't have it handy at the moment, so can't cite a page. It does not seem to be in his oral history [2] (PDF), which I had thought contained pretty much all the meat of his chronicles though.

If you're more interested in just concrete examples of this kind of thing, apparently IBM's System/360 team ran into heaps of this kind of issue when emulating the IBM 1401. It's mentioned in Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.'s book The Mythical Man-Month in the Formal Definitions section of Chapter 6, and I think he probably discussed it in more detail in his (and Blaauw's) book Computer Architecture.

Edit: pasting in a cleaned up version of the relevant part of the transcript:

1:04:56 It's required to run every one of those well, how do I know it does? I can't test them all, so you say well you as long as you design to the architecture spec that should be enough. Right? Ha no for example, inside the architecture spec there are places where it says this condition flag is undefined as a result of this operation so you'll do – I don't know what it was anymore, add operation or something, no, it can't be add pick a different [thing] – there was some instruction that would say I do not guarantee what the carry flag will look like when I'm finished and you go as an architect hey that's cool it means I can do it either way whatever way is easiest. No it doesn't.

Yeah if you think that you're going to get in big trouble. Because what what will happen is – and this literally happened which is why I know about this – you put the chip out and then you discover oh it was easiest for my team to set the bit to a 1 didn't matter because it was undefined right I get to pick, but all the previous chips were setting it to a zero although they were calling it undefined. Now you're in trouble, because what you're going to discover some goofy app out there required that the bit be a zero after that operation even though the book said it was undefined. And they didn't notice because up until now it always was a zero. But your chip comes out, the software doesn't work anymore. Guess who's at fault? You are. Can you go "hey look at what the book says, can't you read?" and they'll say "I don't care what you say your chip doesn't work my software, you're a loser, your chips busted."

[1] https://youtu.be/jwzpk__O7uI?si=iy23ZM5tQX-hI87C&t=3903

[2] https://www.sigmicro.org/media/oralhistories/colwell.pdf