Talk:Pentium FDIV bug

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I am wondering, what "586 Pentium clone" did IBM have for sale in 1994? Crusadeonilliteracy 13:52, 12 Jan 2004 (UTC)

I'm probably the one that wrote the original text; I don't remember where I got that information. [1] claims that IBM introduced the "5x86" in 8/1995; I think that the whole FDIV flap did last the 10 months required for this to be relevant. Cwitty 19:34, 12 Jan 2004 (UTC)

It actually was Cyrix's chip-design; IBM merely physically produced them for Cyrix, and under agreement got to sell some under their own brandname. I don't think the IBM5x86C can be called a Pentium clone from a design point of view. And it went into Socket 3 motherboards Crusadeonilliteracy 00:53, 13 Jan 2004 (UTC)

The idea of the text is to point out that IBM was a competitor of Intel's in terms of selling x86-compatible chips. For that purpose, I'm not sure that it matters who designed the chips, or what motherboard they go in. On the other hand, if you feel that the current text is bad, go ahead and edit it. Cwitty 23:27, 13 Jan 2004 (UTC)

I've edited it to remove any confusion (I hope). --Townmouse 22:42, 8 Jun 2005 (UTC)

[edit] more detail needed?

The article is good but could use some more detail about the precise nature of the bug and its potential consequences. I'm not sure the "of little importance" phrase is NPOV. There's a fair bit of detail in the German article de:Pentium-FDIV-Bug if anybody cares to translate it. --Mathew5000 06:15, 27 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Bad opening sentence?

The original Pentium chip is notorious in computing history, for being the only chip ever made capable of performing the mathematically impossible operation of dividing by zero - due to a bug in the FPU.

This looks like it might be vandalism, or at least badly misinformed. Division by zero in a floating point context has been a fully defined operation since IEEE 754.

Also, the fdiv bug caused incorrect but real results when given real parameters. -- Myria 07:52, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

well spotted Myria, this looks like vandalism to me, as even a casual read of the first paragraph gives an accurate overview of the flaw. I think we should just remove that sentence. -- taviso 16:45, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

I went ahead and killed it. -- taviso 16:48, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia articles need a lead section; inaccurate or not, it did introduce what the article is about. I consider it quite rude to remove it without replacing with a better one [and I'm not the author]. I slapped a {{cleanup}} for now. -- intgr 18:47, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

An inaccurate sentence is considered better than no sentence? Interesting. Sorry, I'll remember that in future. -- taviso 19:39, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

It was not strictly "inaccurate", merely misleading, and it served its purpose. -- intgr 13:47, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

I've written a new lead and removed the generic cleanup tag. However, I'm not sure about the overall structure. It seems to be largely chronological, which is fine, but perhaps it would be better to embrace that and have the play-by-play as a timeline of some sort. --Steven Fisher 22:20, 18 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Trivia or Refferences

The Freakazoid article reffers to this bug. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Can Not (talk • contribs) 00:59, 3 December 2006 (UTC).