AMD to Recall Faulty Opterons – Can Overheat, Cause Floating Point Errors

Ouch – http://www.amd.com/us-en/0,,3715_13965,00.html:

AMD has identified, and subsequently corrected, a test escape that occurred in our post-manufacturing product testing process for a limited number of single-core AMD Opteronâ„¢ processor models x52 and x54. No other single-core AMD Opteron processors, and no dual-core AMD Opteron processors, are affected.
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You must be operating single-core AMD Opteron x52 (2.6 GHz) or x54 (2.8 GHz) processor-based systems, AND you must be running floating point-intensive code sequences.

http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=187001959:

Advance Micro Devices Inc. on Friday said that it has discovered a potential heat problem with a small percentage of Opteron chips run under extreme conditions, and said as many as 3,000 processors at customer sites could be affected.

Update: oops.. here’s an unfortunate advert to appear over the Information Week article.. 😉

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