I'm no lawyer, but my instincts tell me someone would have to prove that the chips today do not conform to Intel's specs, and that this difference is such that the CPU no longer "substantially conforms" to the spec.
> If an instruction does something different than what their specs say on occasion, do they take that to mean it's substantially conforming to their specs?
We're on the same page. What do you think Intel will argue?
Note the first bullet under "WHAT THIS LIMITED WARRANTY DOES NOT COVER":
"design defects or errors in the Product (Errata). Contact Intel for information on characterized errata."
Guess we're not covered on this one.
EDIT: That being said, given the potential scope of this issue (years of affected CPUs, massive PR hit) I'm hoping that Intel will at least offer some remedy to recent buyers. According to the article from The Register [1], OS vendors have been working on the fix since November. The blog posted over on pythonsweetness [2] posits the bug may have been identified in October. It'd be interesting to know for how long Intel has been selling Coffee Lake CPUs that are known to be vulnerable.
Update at 2:08 PM PST: As of 1:49 PM PST, we are fully recovered for operations for adding new objects in S3, which was our last operation showing a high error rate. The Amazon S3 service is operating normally."
I want to see if I can clarify your last point, because it'd be huge if this is true.
You're saying that internal pressure has caused HR to drop ProctorU across the SDE/intern pipeline? What's the replacement, traditional phone screens + onsites?
As far as I understand, it will have a positive effect on S3's latency, for straightforward reasons. But to what extent? Maybe some BOE calculations might help... Throwing out a guess, the gains probably won't be too extreme.
EDIT: Of course this is dependent on what region you're currently in!
> If an instruction does something different than what their specs say on occasion, do they take that to mean it's substantially conforming to their specs?
We're on the same page. What do you think Intel will argue?
Keep in mind Intel did initiate a substantial recall of Pentium CPUs in the late 90s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug