From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] thoughs about venti+fossil From: Charles Forsyth Date: Thu, 6 Mar 2008 19:43:50 +0000 In-Reply-To: <13426df10803061050t72f178d2wecae068942903dcd@mail.gmail.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Topicbox-Message-UUID: 7173be76-ead3-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 > Think about this. You can warm up some CPUs to a point at which they will: > - transparently corrupt floating point computations > - not be warm enough to trigger the "I'm too hot" fault years ago we had a computer that used a Fairchild (Intergraph) Clipper chip. after it arrived it was worryingly unreliable: lots of transient faults and lockups. it turned out that the clever cooling system the computer maker used was just far too efficient, and made the box too cold. the chip didn't work correctly when it was too cold. (no one thought to include an ``it's an ice age'' alert.) they restrained the cooling system and it was then ever so reliable. probably.