Intel has admitted that its new sixth generation processors suffer from a bug that causes the system to freeze when performing complex workloads. It isn’t something most consumer would come across, and mainly affects industries that rely on heavy computing power like research institutes or financial institutions.
The problem was first discovered by the community at hardwareluxx.de, who later passed on their findings to the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS). Both groups worked to verify that there was indeed an issue with Skylake processors before informing Intel about the problem. Intel itself has worked extremely quickly to correct the error, and issued a statement acknowledging that it is aware of the bug:
“Intel has identified an issue that potentially affects the 6th Gen Intel Core family of products. This issue only occurs under certain complex workload conditions, like those that may be encountered when running applications like Prime95. In those cases, the processor may hang or cause unpredictable system behaviour.”
That being said, Intel has not revealed why the bug happens; but it has confirmed that it affects all systems running on the sixth generation Skylake processors. Intel has also developed fix for the bug, and is working with its partners to get it out as a BIOS update as soon as possible.
This isn’t the first time that Intel has experienced bugs with its processors. Early Haswell and Broadwell processors suffered from a TSX bug, which was solved by disabling the capability through a motherboard update.
[Source: Ars Technica]
