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I've been filing bugs to improve Mozilla's crash reporting infrastructure so it's easier to see at a glance if a particular crash affects only a specific CPU but also if only some microcode versions are affected.
I said it before but I'll say it again. I would have never thought that CPU bugs would have become an everyday occurrence, but here we are.
But by all means, keep pouring capitals into "artificial intelligence" while the very foundation of computing is falling apart and we can't trust a machine to execute instructions reliably.
@gabrielesvelto Are you saying these defects are becoming more frequent in newer CPUs? Or is this a problem that has already existed, and we're just getting better at detecting them? This would make a great hacks post (if that site still exists?)
@wlach it wasn't a thing which is why we have "famous" CPU bugs such as the Pentium FDIV issue. In the last few years it has become more and more common, with certain CPU families being particulary affected such as AMD's Jaguar and first Zen generation, as well as Intel's early Atom processors and lately Raptor Lake and its derivatives.
@gabrielesvelto@fosstodon.org @wlach@mastodon.social Is it happening in ARM too or just x86?
@2something @wlach the base of desktop ARM users is too small to tell - basically just people with macs - but we've seen CPU bugs on ARM SoCs used in Android devices. We've also found bugs in CPU emulators: notably QEMU & Rosetta.
@gabrielesvelto @wlach Had an old Ryzen 1800x laying around some time ago and figured we might as well use it as a CI server, so I installed Ubuntu on the box and threw some Yocto builds at it.
The compiler kept segfaulting. Turned out, yeah, the early 1800x models just didn't execute instructions correctly.
So that was fun
@gabrielesvelto Doesn't AI level the playing field, then? Regardless of whether your CPU is reliable or not, you have 40-60% chance of getting nensense.
@shtrom that's a very good point 
@shtrom You beat me to it. 
@gabrielesvelto nobody gets promoted for fixing bugs….
@gabrielesvelto this is the most depressing part to me. We seem to have given up on understanding and rigour, and decided we'll just accept half baked shit. But this is, perhaps, simply the way of the world at this point.
@bhearsum it is, but in our sector there's a point past which things just don't work at all. How far is that going to be given that complexity in the systems we develop and use keeps rising and rising?
@gregtatum @bhearsum the only reason we forget about Me is Vista, but then people forgot about Vista because of 8
@gabrielesvelto @gregtatum @bhearsum Most people also forget that there was a Windows 98 before Windows 98 SE
@gregtatum I sure remember the blue screen of death I usually got before that screenshot!