Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by userbinator 854 days ago
Very interesting topic, but rather low on detail --- really wanted to see what those 60 lines of Asm that allegedly show a faulty CPU instruction were, and also surprised that it wasn't intermittent; in my experience, CPU problems usually are intermittent and heavily dependent upon prior state, and manually stepping through with a debugger has never shown the "1+1=3" type of situation they claim. That said, I wonder if LINPACK'ing would've found it, as that is known to be a very powerful stress-test with divisive opinions among the overclocking community; some, including me, claim that a system can never be considered stable it if fails LINPACK since that is essentially showing intermittent "1+1=3" behaviour, while others are fine with "occasional" discrepancies in its output since the system otherwise appears to be stable.
2 comments

Like all stress tests, linpack will find some errors, but not all.

I had memory stability issues which would immediatly show under Prime95 (less than 1 minute) but pass hours of Linpack.

Prime95 is my gold standard for CPU and memory testing. Everything from desktops to HPC and clustered filesystems get a 24 hour “blend” of tests. If that passes without any instability or bit flips then we’re ready for production.
In my experience, LINPACK (at least the Intel MKL on GenuineIntel combination) is both quicker and more thorough in finding setups that are not actually stable/reliable.
>while others are fine with "occasional" discrepancies

I guess I'd probably be okay with that if the only thing I ever used the computer for was gaming.