Intel discovered that its latest 6th Gen (Skylake) Core processors have a bug that can cause the system to freeze or crash when calculating prime numbers.
While testing Skylake processors with Prime95, a few testers observed that the system would on rare occasions freeze. The bug is not limited to Prime95; it may also affect compute-intensive programs such as scientific and financial applications. This problem affects all Skylake processors ranging from the low-end Core M up to the top-end Xeon CPUs.
Intel told us that average users should not be too concerned about this bug, however, as has only a slim chance of occurring in compute-intensive tasks, and it should not occur unless a user is running extremely complex workloads.
Although it isn’t a serious issue for most users, Intel wants to fix the problem before it can cause trouble for its high-end users, so the company has already created a fix for the problem that can be implemented in the system BIOS. Intel is working with OEMs now to implement it across the various motherboards already released on the market.
It is common that fixing bugs like this can negatively impact performance and power consumption, but Intel stated that while testing the fix, it did not observe any measurable difference in either.
The patch should be available soon.
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