"William H. Geiger III" <whgiii@invweb.net> wrote:

For the same reason Intel does nothing about any of thier bugs: they are assholes. The only way any of these type of things are ever addressed is by enough users putting pressure on Intel to fix their fuckups. (Really slopy not testing the microcode)

Yeah. A conspiracy theorist might be prompted to theorize that Intel deliberately placed this in their processor, took a chance that nobody else would find it and publically release it, and then leaked the information themselves. If they refuse to replace the P5s many people will upgrade to a PPro or a P5. Of course Cyrix and AMD throw a wrench into this theory, but I doubt there are a whole lot of people who won't be buying any more Intel products due to this, and some of the clones have or did have big problems such as annoyingly slow FPUs. If they don't make it extraordinarily easy for me to replace my processor I'll probably be one of the people who falls into the latter catagory and goes off to Cyrixland.