Intel Hyperthreading Bug Unearthed In Kaby Lake And Skylake Processors

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TJ Hooker

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Skylake has been out for close to two years. Even Kaby Lake is about half a year old. It really isn't "first released" behaviour at this point, and Skylake is in no way bleeding edge.
 
D

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This may sound weird, but I'm actually happy about this news.

I've been having problems with Windows 10 hanging almost every day ever since I built a new PC with a Skylake i7 6700K CPU. Despite tons of researching, I never found an explanation for this weird problem, not to mention a solution.

This news is the first time since long that I've seen something that might be related to my issue. Just thinking that I may finally be able to solve my problem by disabling HT fills me with joy.
It sucks, but disabling HT is significantly better than buying a new mainboard and CPU.
 

ammaross

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No, this is very likely not your issue.
 

ffleader1

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It's kinda funny to think that after 5 years without competitor and just need to copy/paste the same architecture over and over again to make profit, Intel still managed to let a bug happen, on two latest generations.
 

nzalog

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Literally all the erratas have no fix.
 

bit_user

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Why do you think so? Neither the article nor the post on the mailing list say anything about Broadwell or Haswell.

The bug was probably introduced in the development of Skylake and carried over to Kaby Lake (there's probably some amount of code reuse between them).
 

bit_user

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It does bug me when people use "leading edge" and "bleeding edge" interchangeably.

I think "bleeding edge" was originally created in reference to alpha/beta-quality stuff (usually software), where as "leading edge" traditionally just meant the latest release or the newest product. But I guess enough people decided they liked the sound of "bleeding edge" so much that they use it exclusively, and it now seems to be displacing the original term even where it would be more appropriate.
 

nzalog

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I've always thought that the "bleeding edge" was just a play on "leading edge" since new stuff tends to have bugs that aren't worked out while leading edge just means the latest cool stuff. Hence why people use it interchangeably because the latest cool stuff tends to have a bunch of patches coming to it before it's considered 100% stable.
 

nzalog

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i5's don't have no hyperthreading, so no bug either.
 

bit_user

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*sigh*

Thanks for catching that.
 

bit_user

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I typically steer clear of the first few steppings of any new CPU. But after a few months, I figure most of the more significant errata have been fixed, and any show-stopper bugs probably would've surfaced by then.

Maybe that's not as sure as I assumed, but there's no way I'm buying CPUs from 2+ generations ago, just to be extra sure they're solid. Obviously not speaking about mission-critical systems, here.
 

Jasjar

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Well a bug is going to keep happening if you don't make any changes to the chip. Intel literally just got Skylake and just made it better at overclocking. But you can't even overclock to the improvements, because Intel who wanted to save $1 on manufacturing on a $400 CPU, used bad thermal paste, instead of soldering the IHS. The response Intel gave was "Stop overclocking if you don't want high temps". Yes, don't overclock on a CPU that was sold to overclock.
 

lilyammy

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fml. Here I was getting ready to snuggle in for an evening of running sets of 63 instructions using BH and EAX registers on both logical cores of my same physical processor.
 
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