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by msla 670 days ago
Yes, it would be disastrous if a widely-used chip had a bug in its division opcode.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug

It would be disastrous if a widely-used chip had a bug in a lock prefix that allowed crafted untrusted binaries to soft-brick the whole machine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_F00F_bug

I'm not even mentioning the weirdnesses from the eight-bit era. We all know those chips were heroic efforts to get anything done given transistor budgets, and error checking was simply not possible. The point is, even mature proprietary companies have had severe hardware bugs for longer than many here have been around, even if you discount stuff like spectre and meltdown.