Elmer:
C2D is even more broken if you go by the errata. AI124 is a show stopper. You have a server and everything is running fine and then comes a day where it just royally screws up. One single instance of that and many wouldn't touch it with a ten foot cattle prod. Some gamers and others might not mind rebuilding it from scratch every 4-6 months, but I am not one of them. Most like you would blame it on Microsoft or some one loading a crap software program. But the server I referred to was a server from a VAR and only had their software loaded on it.
The previous box was a P4 that ran for 2 years before the RAID controller went south. The VAR replaced it with a Core 2 Duo based server and it ran just fine for 4 months and then corrupted the registry so bad, that the server had to be rebuilt from scratch (reformat the disks, reload Windows, Oracle, Application code, configuration and data from the nightly backups). It took more than 20 hours to get it back online. There was no software loaded, no disk, memory, CPU or controller that went bad (tested and logs checked). It just woke up Monday morning as the users got to work and trashed the registry.
Can I prove it was errata AI124? No, but it fits the symptoms. And the same software, tools and OS worked fine on a P4. If it would have just hung, it wouldn't have cost much, 15 minutes as it was rebooted into the operational state.
Had that happened to a critical server for the business, that hardware would be blacklisted and never bought again. If that server does it again, there will be no Core 2 based servers bought here ever again. That is how bad a random jump CPU errata is. That is not meaningless. AMD's errata is on a different lower level. It doesn't corrupt a good working system. At least AMD will fix theirs. Intel won't fix a show stopper and that is far worse. Intermittent bugs are the hardest to find and fix for obvious reasons.
As for OEMs qualifying C2Ds, remember the FDIV errata? That didn't show up for a year and only because of a Mathematician who noticed it. Errata do slip through the cracks. And it was bought in the dozens of millions by then. And then there is the other classic case of the P3-1.13GHz. Intel downplayed that a linux kernel compile was an obscure application. It slipped through OEM validation, too. The only good thing was that Intel couldn't make many of them so the quantities were very small. IIRC, it took Intel six months to fix and more to get volume up.
So if Barcelona is broken, then C2D is busted. The fact that you don't like it is just too bad.
Pete
AI
