Intel Confirms Bug With Skylake CPUs

Intel has stepped up and confirmed that there is a bug in its sixth-gen Core products that have the codename Skylake. The bug in question can cause the system to hang under complex workloads. The only application that Intel has confirmed to cause the issue so far is Prime95.

The problem was originally identified back in December by testers who found random crashes of the Prime95 software during the 786k test on the new Intel processors. The software would fail sometimes after only a few minutes of operation and other times after hours of operation.

Lots of user testing went through hardware issues that could cause the failure and eventually the solution was found to be disabling hyper-threading, at least according to user reports. As it stands running Prime95 on Skylake parts with a maximum number of threads with CpuSupportsFMA3=0 at 768 FFT size causes the system to crash eventually.

Intel has said that it has identified an issue that could affect its sixth Gen Core family of CPUs. Intel says that it is releasing a fix for the issue and is working with partners to get the fix deployed via BIOS. This isn't the first flaw of this sort for chipmakers, faults have been found in many Intel and AMD processors over the years.

SOURCE: Extremetech