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Intel Pentium's FDIV Flaw
The Pentium FDIV bug was a bug in the Intel P5 Pentium floating point unit (FPU). Certain floating point division operations performed with these processors would produce incorrect results. According to Intel, there were a few missing entries in the lookup table used by the divide operation algorithm.
The flaw was independently discovered and publicly disclosed in October 1994 by Professor Thomas Nicely, then at Lynchburg College, Virginia, USA.
Although encountering the flaw was extremely rare in practice (Byte magazine estimated that 1 in 9 billion floating point divides with random parameters would produce inaccurate results),both the flaw and Intel's initial handling of the matter were heavily criticized. Intel ultimately recalled the defective processors.
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