Intel Skylake bug causes systems to crash when calculating prime numbers
A bug with Intel's entire range of Skylake processors may cause your system to freeze or crash when calculating prime numbers or running other compute-intensive workloads.
There’s something odd afoot with Intel's Skylake processors. If you happen to be calculating prime numbers on your Skylake system, your PC might freeze up or crash, the result of a bug with Intel’s sixth-generation Core processors.
A few testers reportedly observed the bug while testing Skylake processors with Prime95, but the issue may also surface in compute-intensive programs such as scientific and financial applications. All Skylake processors, from the lower-powered Core m up to the high-end Xeon CPUs, are affected.
Nevertheless, average users should not be too concerned as they will not likely be running the complex, compute-intensive workloads that could trigger the bug. Of course, Intel still wants to rectify the problem to give professionals and other users a peace of mind, and has apparently already readied a solution that is to be implemented in the system BIOS. The chipmaker is now working with OEMs to roll out the fix across the various motherboards already on the market.
For those of you concerned that the patch could negatively impact performance and power consumption, Intel said that it did not notice any significant differences while testing it.
Source: Tom’s Hardware
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