P66 FDIV Replacement Boxed

The first Pentium processors were released to an expectant world in March 1993. The Intel hype engine very much went into overdrive with the much-vaunted ‘Pentium’ processor being sold as the ‘next big thing’. 

The FDIV bug

All CPUs have bugs in them somewhere, somehow. These are logic or system errata; things that don’t quite work out as they should do. All CPU suppliers keep track of these issues as they are reported by the buying public, and once proven, a logic fix is issued into the next ‘stepping’ of the CPU, and eventually the manufacturer stop productions of the older design/stepping, and restarts using the new fixed one.