A few weeks ago a team of mathematicians called the Mersenne Community, came across a bug in the Intel Skylake architecture. When such Intel systems were tasked with hunting for prime numbers, using the Prime95 software, they would reproducibly experience system freezes depending upon the program parameters. The same software "works perfectly normal" on all other Intel processors of past generations, it was noted.
The Mersenne Community have found all the record prime numbers of the last 20 years. It was noted that the handcoded assembly language in use for the last 20 years on tens of thousands of machines running 24 hours a day was only stumbling on Skylake powered PCs. Finding that Intel's latest and greatest processors would freeze systems running applications they commonly use to hunt down prime numbers was obviously perturbing for the mathematicians.
When the problem was reported Intel asked a number of questions about system configurations and so on, so it could replicate the issue and diagnose the problems. The community detailed the application program settings, provided system information, software and component lists etc.
BIOS updates on the way to fix problem says Intel
Four days ago Intel reported that its engineering department had identified the issue which "only occurs under certain complex workload conditions... [when] the processor may hang or cause unpredictable system behaviour". It has released a fix for the issue to hardware partners which will be distributed via BIOS updates for Skylake compatible motherboards. Now users will just have to wait for their motherboard vendors to publish BIOS updates with the Intel fix incorporated.
