- Intel’s $475 million error: the silicon behind the Pentium division bug (righto.com)
In 1993, Intel released the high-performance Pentium processor, the start of the long-running Pentium line. The Pentium had many improvements over the previous processor, the Intel 486, including a faster floating-point division algorithm. A year later, Professor Nicely, a number theory professor, was researching reciprocals of twin prime numbers when he noticed a problem: his Pentium sometimes generated the wrong result when performing floating-point division. Intel considered this “an extremely minor technical problem”, but much to Intel’s surprise, the bug became a large media story. After weeks of criticism, mockery, and bad publicity, Intel agreed to replace everyone’s faulty Pentium chips, costing the company $475 million.
- Marco Brambilla (Wikipedia)
Marco Brambilla (born 25 September 1960) is an Italian-born Canadian contemporary artist and film director, known for directing the film Demolition Man and episodes of the TV series Dinotopia as well as re-contextualizations of popular and found imagery, and use of 3D imaging technologies in public installations and video art.