divide-by-zero floating point exception

[idata]

Greetings...

This is a question directly for Intel Support tech.

Over the last 1.5 week, I've been tracking some weird divide-by-zero debug behavior I was getting on a new HP machine. To make a very very very long story short... after numerous steps taken to troubleshoot the problem, I finally concluded yesterday that this was actually a hardware, BIOS or firmware generic issue for the specific machine series I had. Finally... one thing led to another and I came across this intel document:

http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/specification-updates/2nd-gen-core-desktop-specification-update.pdf http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/specification-updates/2nd-gen-core-desktop-specification-update.pdf

errata BJ1

My CPU is an Intel i5-2500. As the documentation states, "Intel has not observed this erratum with any commercially available software or system." well... we just did. The software we use is a fairly common software in the Nuclear Simulator World and that's where the problem showed up. So I suspect this problem could affect many nuclear simulators in the country (USA). Are there any plans on fixing this, one way or another? We were planning to purchase 3 more identical computers before the end of the year... but this bug is now putting a stop to this. We need to know what can be done about this, if anything, before we proceed.

I can provide more details... but since this problem is already identified within that linked documentation... I'm assuming Intel's engineers will know what I'm talking about.

Thanks.

[idata]

I can see all the Intel engineers working hard at providing answers...

[idata]

If you are serious about this apparent problem, you should contact Intel Support directly, rather than post in the User Community forum:

http://www.intel.com/p/en_US/support/contactsupport http://www.intel.com/p/en_US/support/contactsupport

The i5-2500 processor has recently been pronounced an End of Life product:

http://ark.intel.com/products/52209/Intel-Core-i5-2500-Processor-6M-Cache-up-to-3_70-GHz http://ark.intel.com/products/52209/Intel-Core-i5-2500-Processor-6M-Cache-up-to-3_70-GHz

Therefore, it is doubtful any changes to it will occur.

You may want to consider the i5-3570 processor, its current replacement, or its next iteration, which is scheduled for Q2 2013.

[idata]

Hi parsec,

I pretty much concluded that yesterday... Originally, I kind of followed the proposed "path" for technical support. But when it became apparent that the Intel guys themselves weren't reading this, I finally went ahead and did what you just said. In the mean time, I'll look at what else is out there, including your link... I got to make sure the same problem doesn't exist on those as well, seeing how this problem creaped up on so many of their CPU's listed in my link.

Thanks for taking the time.

[idata]

well... it appears I'm running into the same issues with the i5-3570!! All the details of the original problem can be found under my hp post here:

http://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Desktop-Hardware/divide-by-zero-weird-problem-on-HP-8200-Elite-SFF/td-p/2195155 divide-by-zero weird problem on HP 8200 Elite SFF - HP Support Forum