October 9, 2014

How to Justify Finding a Bug

The above code, cribbed from Bruce Dawson's weblog, purportedly shows a bug in Intel's firmware. Compiling the code with gcc, on NetBSD 6.1.4 and running it gives the following results:

% ./pitest
pi = 3.141592653589793115997963468544185
   + 0.000000000000000122460635382237726
     3.141592653589793238458598850781911*
Arithmetic gives 3.141592653589793238458598850781911, but $sin ( \pi ) = 0$ so it ought to be closer to the first value than it is. The good news is that Intel is updating their documentation.

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