Intel Corp (INTC)

[Cal Berkeley]

Andy - do you think this may be a problem? Especially with the commercial server customers AMD hopes to win? I think a lot of them use Linux - no?

“Discussions in industry forums for gamers and semiconductor professionals describe chips
failing due to potential segment faults with AMD’s new Ryzen processor,”

Detwiler Fenton

analyst Dan Nenni wrote Wednesday morning.
“We are hearing that even with the latest BIOS there are intermittent crashes which are very
problematic and may be hard to debug.”

Related Link: Advanced Micro Devices Continues To Rally
The issues are reportedly impacting Linux distributions such as CentOS, Ubuntu, Fedora and Arch.

Detwiler Fenton has heard that AMD targeted highend
gaming companies using Linux to test
the waters on Ryzen before expanding to Windows in the future. The idea behind the strategy,
Nenni says, would be to target users that are most likely to have demanding workloads to
identify any potential performance problems.

These types of bugs are relatively common during the hardware development phase, but Nenni
says that problems with Ryzen chips seem to be persisting even after BIOS upgrades.

AMD is reportedly aware of the issues and has asked customers not to “open new tickets”
related to the problems. Detwiler Fenton noted a software revision could create a fix.

The worstcase
scenario for AMD would be an expensive chip respin,
which would take up to
six months to complete and would likely be an expensive process, Nenni said.