Xemectrum

If you open Intel’s official document, on page 37 AAJ1 Clarification of TRANSLATION LOOKASIDE BUFFERS (TLBS) Invalidation part, you will see that Intel says that in some rare cases improper TLB invalidation may result in unpredictable system behavior and can hang your OS or result with incorrect data.

"In rare instances, improper TLB invalidation may result in unpredictable system behavior, such as system hangs or incorrect data. Developers of operating systems should take this documentation into account when designing TLB invalidation algorithms. For the processors affected, Intel has provided a recommended update to system and BIOS vendors to incorporate into their BIOS to resolve this issue."

The BIOSes to workarround the TBL bug already are in place and it seems that this fix has very little effect on overall performance. AMD at the time simply switched off the entire TBL, and as to what Intel precisely did to address the issue .. is not yet known.

The BIOS update was issued on 14-11-08, before the products actually hit retail. In Intel's defense, so far everything we tested .. was 100% stable and extremely fast. But we'll report more once we hear more.

First off, there is indeed no cold bug and these things just crave cold temperatures albeit with one caveat that will be discussed later. Second, there is no TLB issue resulting in castrated L3 cache so everything is shipshape with the circuits. And last, those 3GHz launch speeds? Very true, and judging from my sample, AMD should be able to release a 3.2GHz or faster Phenom II soon enough.