How many Intel engineers does it take to change a lightbulb?

[eridani]

1.9999999999, which is close enough for most applications.

http://www.manufacturing.net/News/2011/02/Electrical-Electronics-Intel-Selling-Faulty-Chip-Again/?et_cid=1092741&et_rid=54679148&linkid=http%3a%2f%2fwww.manufacturing.net%2fNews%2f2011%2f02%2fElectrical-Electronics-Intel-Selling-Faulty-Chip-Again%2f

Intel Corp. has resumed shipments of a chip with a known flaw. But in order to get it, computer makers must promise not to use it in designs that trigger the serious performance problem.

Intel stopped production of the faulty "chipset" last month, after discovering that it would cause some computers to gradually lose their ability to talk to their hard disk and DVD drives. Cleanup was expected to cost $1 billion.

The admission was both an embarrassment for the world's biggest computer chip maker, as well as a sign that Intel learned its lesson from its famously botched handling of another chip flaw issue nearly 20 years ago.

Intel said Monday that its customers demanded that the latest faulty chip go back on sale while Intel hustles out a fixed version, which is expected to ship this month.

Computers can be designed in a way that avoids the problem. Two big computer makers, Hewlett-Packard Co. and Dell Inc., have said some of their machines have the faulty chip. They have offered refunds.

Intel said the latest decision wouldn't change the company's financial guidance.

[The Straight Story]

1. I am old, I still remember their previous chip problem - for those who don't:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug

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.<1>

The flaw was independently discovered and publicly disclosed in October 1994 by Professor Thomas Nicely, then at Lynchburg College, Virginia, USA.<2>

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),<3> both the flaw and Intel's initial handling of the matter were heavily criticized. Intel ultimately recalled the defective processors.


---We got some laughs out of it back in the day :)

[Hello_Kitty]

2. Well I guess there's a good side to my having had to sell their stock when I was out of work.