Have you encountered unexplained application and system hiccups, data corruption, or data loss? That could be because your chipset has hyper-threading enabled and these chips are malfunctioning.
Henrique de Moraes Holschuh, a Debian Linux developer, reported the Intel chip problem on the Debian developer list. Officially, Intel hasn’t admitted the problem, but engineers at Dell and Intel have told me that the problem is present and its fix, exists.
This processor/microcode bug has been found on Intel Skylake and Intel Kaby Lake processors with hyper-threading enabled. Besides those 6th and 7th generation Intel Core processors, it’s also discovered on its related server processors, such as Xeon v5 and Xeon v6, and some picked Intel Pentium processor models.
While the Debian community reported the problem, it’s not Linux-specific. Any operating system — Windows, macOS, and FreeBSD can run into the problem.
According to Intel chip errata, “Under complex micro-architectural situations, short loops of less than 64 instruction code that use AH, BH, CH or DH registers as well as their similar wider register (e.g. RAX, EAX or AX for AH) may generate unpredictable system behavior. This can only occur when both logical processors on the same physical processor are working.”
This will direct to the computer experiencing “unpredictable system behavior.” What programs will make the computer to act up? That’s a good question, and we don’t have a good answer. As Holschuh wrote, “We do not possess enough information at this time to understand how much software out there will trigger this specific defect.”
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