Comment Re:Corruption (Score 5, Insightful) 203
No CPU can guarantee to be free of corruption, the goal of the designer is just to minimize the likelihood of corruption. The design margins are usually such that proper operation is ensured, except for the statistical outliers. However, even CPUs with several error checking and correcting mechanisms can still corrupt data, it is just extremely unlikely. A CPU can never know for sure if it can compute a result accurately, or if an operation was performed correctly, just like no communications system can achieve bit error rates of 0.
Data corruption in integrated circuits can come from several different sources. Cosmic rays are likely to alter memory values, especially so in DRAM cells. Typically, only ICs for space applications are actually radiation hardened. Much less likely, transistor device noise can corrupt data. Transistor device noise is usually more an issue in RF circuits. Finally, not all manufacturing defects can be found during manufacturing test, since most test sequences don't even achieve 100% fault coverage under currently used fault models, and this does not even consider how closely the models represent the actually circuit failure modes.
Really, for most people this floating point data corruption is probably a non-issue. It is even more unlikely that errors in floating point data lead to exploits. It is more likely that some bits of your DRAM memory will get corrupted. On my system with ECC RAM that is a few years old, logs show that I get about 1 or 2 (correctable) errors per day...
Data corruption in integrated circuits can come from several different sources. Cosmic rays are likely to alter memory values, especially so in DRAM cells. Typically, only ICs for space applications are actually radiation hardened. Much less likely, transistor device noise can corrupt data. Transistor device noise is usually more an issue in RF circuits. Finally, not all manufacturing defects can be found during manufacturing test, since most test sequences don't even achieve 100% fault coverage under currently used fault models, and this does not even consider how closely the models represent the actually circuit failure modes.
Really, for most people this floating point data corruption is probably a non-issue. It is even more unlikely that errors in floating point data lead to exploits. It is more likely that some bits of your DRAM memory will get corrupted. On my system with ECC RAM that is a few years old, logs show that I get about 1 or 2 (correctable) errors per day...
