AMD Opteron CPUs hit by heat stroke
AMD today admitted it has inadvertently allowed a number of 2.6GHz and 2.8GHz single-core Opteron x52 and x54 processors that could corrupt data under extreme conditions to escape into the wild.
It is believed that the glitch is triggered when the affected chip's FPU is made to loop through a series of memory-fetch, multiplication and addition operations without any condition checks on the result of the calculations. The loop has to run over and over again for long enough to cause localised heating which together with high ambient temperatures could combine to cause the result of the operation to be recorded incorrectly, leading to data corruption.
