Bugs and problems

Bugs and problems

The early versions of 60-100 MHz Pentiums had a problem in the floating point unit that resulted in incorrect (but predictable) results from some division operations. This bug, discovered in 1994 by professor Thomas Nicely at Lynchburg College, Virginia, became known as the Pentium FDIV bug and caused embarrassment for Intel, which created an exchange program to replace the faulty processors. Soon afterwards, a bug was discovered which could allow a malicious program to crash a system without any special privileges (the f00f bug); fortunately, operating systems were able to implement workarounds to prevent crashes.

The 60 and 66 MHz 0.8 µm versions of the Pentium processors also had (for the time) high heat production due to their 5V operation. The P54C used 3.3V and had significantly lower power draw (a quadratic relationship). P5 Pentiums used Socket 4, while P54C started out on Socket 5 before moving to Socket 7 in later revisions. All desktop Pentiums from P54CS onwards used Socket 7.