Facts are wonderful things don't ya know.
You don’t like Intel so that makes it okay for the EU to shake them down??? Whatever Intel’s putative sins, that only issues that matter here are whether they behaved in an illegal manner that harmed consumers. The fact that their chips had a math problem is entirely irrelevant.
Do you have some examples of things that haven’t been fixed / eliminated since say 1994 and 2000 respectively?
I think we’re well past Pentium I, II, and III.
Heck, my 6+ year old PentiumIV still works just fine, but I can’t say that about the one and only AMD based system I ever built. I used that system for less than 2 years and had nothing but problems with it.
Please, provide some recent examples, perhaps more direct info on the IP stealing of Digital’s info.
Oh, that's an old wives tale ;)
The Pentium Papers -- ARCHIVED
It's only a problem if you're doing silly things like:
- building skyscrapers that must be precisely balanced
- simulating aircraft aerodynamics
- balancing monetary systems (sadly, it can't be scapegoated to explain where all of our tax dollars have been going...)
For more recent examples:
I got one of the Wolfdales with the bad temp sensor in it.
Doesn’t matter much though - running 4ghz+ without a temp increase anyway so it was a moot point - but still: their fault for crappy quality control. I could probably push this thing up high enough to degrade it because of the volt increase without a temp increase even: but any way you want to slice it the cpu is still “defective” because of that temp sensor. As it is, I wish I had some more accurate readings from the onboard instead of having to use a secondary sensor to read the temp.
I can’t complain about the raw performance however as it rocks socks. My point is just that your right - they have a history of shipping bad cpu’s.
However in fairness - AMD has had its own issues as well - just not anywhere near as many as Intel.
Learn to read.
I didn’t say that Intel never had a math bug - or many other bugs over the years for that matter.
I simply said I don’t remember them ever on the “brink of going belly up”.
And...
It is still all about software not hardware.
There are a number of unique ID numbers in EVERY computer, not just the CPU.
It is all about software controlling what and who has access to said numbers. If the OS software prevents reading whatever, whatever isn’t read. For example your flash ROM in your computer that holds the system BIOS has a unique serial number that is CPU readable in every chip. The same with your video card. And your hard drive...
So try again.
Your links don’t support your contention that Intel was on the brink of going belly-up.
I knew some of its top process engineers well in the timeframe in question. Unless my incipient Alzheimer’s has taken a real leap in the past hour, at no point were they on any brink of any belly-up.