Intel details Itanium 2 bug

Intel is working with Itanium 2 server vendors on a bug that has surfaced in the McKinley version of its Itanium processor family, an Intel spokeswoman said Monday.

The "erratum" is confined to a subset of Intel's McKinley Itanium 2 processors, said Barbara Grimes, an Intel spokeswoman. An electrical issue with the processor can cause systems to behave unpredictably or shut down, she said.

Customers can work around the problem by lowering the clock speed of their 900MHz or 1GHz Itanium 2 processors to 800MHz, Grimes said. They should contact their system vendor to determine the best course of action, she said. Intel will swap out older McKinley processors for new ones upon request, but the company is not issuing a recall, she said.

IBM will stop shipments of the recently announced x450 server, IBM's first product with Itanium 2, according to Lisa Lanspery, an IBM spokeswoman. The company has a handful of customers using the x450 so far, but hasn't received notice of any problems with those systems, she said. IBM does not currently know when it will resume shipments, she said.

Hewlett-Packard (HP), Intel's main partner with the Itanium processor, is still shipping its Itanium systems, said Jim Dunlap, an HP spokesman. HP co-developed the processor with Intel, and has introduced the largest number of servers based on the chip. The company is still working with Intel on the problem, and hasn't determined exactly what is the best solution for its customers, he said.

Unisys spokesman Stephen Holzman said the company is satisfied with the measures Intel has prescribed, and there has been no impact on its shipment schedules.

In order to crash the system, a particular sequence of operations and events need to happen in step, Grimes said. Intel discovered the problem in lab testing after a system vendor reported it earlier this year, she said.

This indicates that it isn't a problem with the core logic, said Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst with Insight 64 in Saratoga, California. Since all the chips have essentially the same logic design, a problem with only a particular set of chips indicates the problem is in how the electrons travel across the chip, he said.

Details as to what types of data or configurations cause a system to shut down are unclear. The problem is not related to a particular batch of processors, or any one instruction or data stream, Grimes said. A field test can determine if a particular McKinley processor is affected by the bug, but problems can occur on systems that test clean in the field, Grimes said. Intel has developed a manufacturing test for processors coming out of its fabs that identifies the problem, she said.

Intel hasn't found any commercially available software that can cause the problem, said Kevin Krewell, senior editor of the Microprocessor Report in San Jose, California.

McKinley was introduced last July. It solved many of the performance issues that held back adoption of the first Itanium product, Merced, but customers have still been reluctant to purchase systems with the chip outside of the high-performance computing market.