On Tue, 22 Jun 2004 11:03:14 +0100, "Peter Dickerson"
wrote:
"Yousuf Khan" wrote in message
t.cable.rogers.com...
Jeff Butler wrote:
http://www.3dchips.net/content/story.php?id=3927

No information on any BIOS update from my motherboard manufacturer
(ASUS) yet.

Wonder how a BIOS update is going to resolve a problem within the
instruction set? Unless it's a firmware patch that's included in the BIOS.

Yousuf Khan

The description of the bug suggests that it is due to a performance
optimization - e.g. only occurs when some other microcoded insructions are
in the pipeline. Its possible that AMD has a means to disable such
optimizations which would reduce performance in some cases. Hopefully this
won't have much impact on performance in the typical case.

Microcode instructions are already pretty slow and therefore rarely
used anyway, so I doubt that it would make a big difference. These
sorts of errata are not particularly rare in modern processor designs,
pretty much all chips have bugs that are not entirely unlike this one.
FWIW here's the link to AMD's own Revision Guide (aka errata sheet):

http://www.amd.com/us-en/assets/cont...docs/25759.pdf


The particular bug in question is number 109 and was just added in the
latest update along with bug 111 ("Rtt Specification Violation", a
seemingly inconsequential issue with hypertransport).

-------------
Tony Hill
hilla underscore 20 at yahoo dot ca