Stefan Mileschin

Cores don't count. Things are getting worse, not better

A recent presentation by Google engineer Peter Hochschild has revealed that chip design is going downhill and there are higher-than-expected hardware errors that "showed themselves sporadically, long after installation, and on specific, individual CPU cores rather than entire chips or a family of parts".

Google researchers examining these silent corrupt execution errors (CEEs) concluded "mercurial cores" were to blame for CPUs that occasionally miscalculated, under different circumstances, in a way that defied prediction.

The errors were not the result of chip architecture design missteps, and they're not detected during manufacturing tests. Rather, Google engineers theorise, the errors have arisen because we've pushed semiconductor manufacturing to a point where failures have become more frequent, and we lack the tools to identify them in advance.

In a paper titled "Cores that don't count", Hochschild and chums Paul Turner, Jeffrey Mogul, Rama Govindaraju, Parthasarathy Ranganathan, David Culler, and Amin Vahdat cite several plausible reasons why the unreliability of computer cores is only now receiving attention, including larger server fleets that make rare problems more visible, increased attention to overall reliability, and software development improvements that reduce the rate of software bugs.

https://fudzilla.com/news/pc-hardwar...ardware-errors