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by Animats 184 days ago
> In 1994, came the Pentium with its FDIV bug: a probably insignificant but detectable error in floating-point division. The subsequent product recall cost Intel nearly half a billion dollars. John Harrison, a student of Mike’s, decided to devote his PhD research to the verification of floating-point arithmetic.

No mention of the effort by Boyer and Moore, then at their Computational Logic, Inc., to do a formal verification of the AMD FPU for the AMD5K86TM. The AMD chip shipped with no FDIV bug. [1]

[1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1109/12.713311

1 comments

ACL2 doesn't get a lot of love from the side of the verification community that focuses on the proof systems that are more academically popular (HOL family, CIC family, etc.). A lot of interesting industrial work has been done with ACL2 and related systems.
Yes. Been there, done that, with the pre-ACL2 Boyer-Moore prover. We had the Oppen-Nelson prover (the first SAT solver) handling the easy stuff, and used the Boyer-Moore prover for the hard stuff. Not that much manual work.
I assume you mean first SMT solver when you refer to Oppen-Nelson? I thought their contribution was the basis for SMT methods.