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Volume Number: 11
Issue Number: 2
Column Tag: The Editor’s Page
The Editor’s Page 
By Scott T Boyd, Editor
Learning From Others’ Mistakes
If the world didn’t know about Intel’s Pentium processor before, they sure do now.
Intel spent millions last year flying their logo around TV sets to establish their brand
image. If only they’d known how much cheaper it would be to have Andrew Grove, Intel
President and CEO, apologize on the Internet. Never mind that many on the net took
offense that Intel would choose when and whether to replace a customer’s chip. Intel
not only seemed reluctant to own up to their problem (they did, after all, wait several
months until someone else discovered it independently, to mention it), but much of
what they said sounded more like they were upset that they got caught.
Those of us Macintosh supporters smugly rubbing our hands together with glee
and thinking, “Goody, goody! Intel’s in trouble,” may have another thing coming. Intel
hurt their reputation, right? Was it just my imagination, or was that a full-length
Pentium ad shown on MacNeil/Lehrer, Night Line, and every other major news
program? Will the market remember Intel’s mistake? Or will they remember over a
full week of coverage? Will they remember the names Intel and Pentium? and that
Intel eventually took care of their customers? Even with a chargeback of tens of
millions of dollars to pay for the chip replacements, Intel may have scored an
advertising coup like we’ve never seen before.
For the Morbidly Curious
After reading Intel’s white paper (http://www.intel.com), IBM’s position paper
(http://www.ibm.com), and Intel’s rebuttal to IBM’s paper, there seems to be no
disagreement about the source of the bug (missing entries in a lookup table caused by a
flawed script written to download entries into a hardware PLA (Programmable Lookup
Array)). They also seem to agree about the worst-case impact on any single operation
(inaccuracies can occur starting with the 4th significant decimal digit).
How politics affected the presentation of the data shows in the assumptions each
party made. Intel assumed that the average spreadsheet user about 1000 floating point
divides on any given day, and that numbers are uniformly distributed. They also used
spreadsheets from all around Intel to determine the probability of occurrence for bad
number combinations.
IBM, on the other hand, figured that the average spreadsheet user would spend
about 15 minutes a day recalculating, and would get one divide per 16,000
instructions when recalculating. At 90MHz, that’s about 4687 divides/second, or
4.2M per day. They also assert that all bit patterns are not equally probable. They
created random numbers in a variety of common decimal patterns, and used them to
create numerators and denominators. Their observations led them to believe that one
out of every 100 million divisions might lead to bad results.
Intel says one error every 27,000 years. IBM says every 24 days. Do you hear
the axes grinding? Bottom line? Intel takes a $35M-$70M charge against earnings to
give customers what they want (and now they know what’s inside and that they want
one).
Hungry and Sleepy?
I recently got a Connectix QuickCam (the $99 all-seeing eyeball that plugs into a
Mac’s serial port). I plugged it in, installed some software, and all of a sudden my
modem was a problem. Not that there’s anything technically wrong with the modem or
their software - perhaps I should back up and explain a bit.
The camera works with pretty much any QuickTime software. One particularly
interesting application is CU-SeeMe, a free application from Cornell University which
supports real-time multi-party videoconferencing on the Internet. Even a 14.4
connection will get you video, but it’ll leave you hungry for more - much more
bandwidth, that is. Four of us in three different parts of the country got online with
three different cameras and a VCR. Even though we didn’t do much more than watch
each other smile at the camera, we had so much fun that we were all wondering how to
beg, borrow, or steal more bandwidth (know any internet providers who want to trade
Macintosh code for a frame relay connection?). We don’t know whether it will help
our virtual businesses (it sure didn’t help our sleep patterns), but we have little
doubt that videoconferencing will one day look no more surprising in a home office than
a copier, fax machine, or a Macintosh.
Quotable
“We’re certainly not going to replace your Pentium chip just so you can play Doom!”
- Intel Pentium hotline staffer
“Maybe you ought to consider a Macintosh this Christmas.”
- Wall Street Journal 15 Dec 1994
“I suppose it is the corrected chip that will be called RePentium.”
- Peter G. Neumann
“Intel - changing the way people think about floating point.”
- excerpt from a speech, originally intended as a compliment,
as reported by Jörg Brown
Food For Thought
Right in the middle of a MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour montage of Pentium clips, I saw
Apple’s Graphing Calculator spinning a 3D parabolic equation. They didn’t realize they
were showing Apple’s Power Macintosh, not a Pentium box. Do you think they might
have been able to see the bugs had it really been running on a Pentium?