News AMD engineer discusses AMD's 'Layoff Bug' — infamous Barcelona CPU bug revisited 16 years later

[Admin]

Phil Park, an AMD memory and Fabric performance engineer, discusses a critical Windows Vista-era AMD CPU bug that struck Barcelona CPUs.

AMD engineer discusses AMD's 'Layoff Bug' — infamous Barcelona CPU bug revisited 16 years later : Read more

 

[stonecarver]

Makes since. At the time back than I didn't really pay attention to the in's and out's of CPU data corruption or worse. What I did know I always wondered why a CPU needed a driver and if I used the AMD driver my gaming rig was slower.

Two edge sword I guess. I never considered this Layoff Bug as it's called as to why a few years back went Intel.

I know AMD is back on top with Ryzen CPU's but it does explain a few things on my journey through the years.

 

[DS426]

I remember getting bit by the TLB bug back in the day. I think I had a Phenom X4 9500 if I recall correctly. I did get a BSOD occasionally that I couldn't attribute to anything else... granted that was the days of Vista, which of course crashed frequently for a myriad of reasons, whether the kernel itself, drivers, and so on. I think I did end up upgrading my BIOS and enabling the software fix. I don't know that I had a powerful enough GPU at the time to notice the performance hit, unless I had a CPU-bound game or two.

 

[mitch074]

I remember getting bit by the TLB bug back in the day. I think I had a Phenom X4 9500 if I recall correctly. I did get a BSOD occasionally that I couldn't attribute to anything else... granted that was the days of Vista, which of course crashed frequently for a myriad of reasons, whether the kernel itself, drivers, and so on. I think I did end up upgrading my BIOS and enabling the software fix. I don't know that I had a powerful enough GPU at the time to notice the performance hit, unless I had a CPU-bound game or two.

I managed to sidestep the original Phenom completely, but I got an Athlon II X4 620 that had 6 Mb of L3 cache disabled - activating it did lead to some improved performance in some cases, and was for that reason similar to your chip.
It ran hot yet overclocked like mad (especially with L3 cache switched off), I kept it for 4 years as my main rig - it took a Haswell quad core to convince me to jump ship. Strongly downclocked and undervolted, it served as my living room PC for quite a while after that - sync'ed with the RAM clock speed and L3 cache activated, it was cold, quiet and deadly. However, you had to look for it, and only cheap PCs were ever sold with it - I can understand AMD suffering greatly because of it