Re: "Not" gate

Posted by WBahn on Feb 05, 2021; 5:05pm
URL: http://nand2tetris-questions-and-answers-forum.52.s1.nabble.com/Not-gate-tp4035528p4035638.html

Companies often respond to situations much like humans do -- which is not surprising since companies are nothing more than collections of humans.

If I remember correctly, the processor had a $700 retail price tag and so Intel quite naturally didn't want to have to wholesale replace or refund that kind of money, even at their cost. Their initial response saying that the errors were negligible and couldn't result in a meaningful problem were largely taken at face value because Intel enjoyed a pretty positive reputation as a company that could be trusted. When it was rather quickly shown that it was possible for the bug to produce large errors (using specially contrived input values), most people assumed that Intel simply hadn't known that to be the case and, well, that happens. But as Intel kept downplaying the nature of the bug even as more and more "everyday" examples of significant errors were reported, people started getting suspicious. At that point they offered to replace any affected processor that could be shown to have actually caused a meaningful problem. That pissed people off because that would be like saying that they would replace parachutes that had a known defect only if you could show that you were injured as a result of it not opening. But what REALLY sent people over the edge what when it was discovered that Intel had known about the problem much, much earlier than they claimed they had and had just hoped that no one else would notice -- and, in point of fact, it did require a lot of very sensitive and extensive analysis for someone to spot it.

It would be interesting if we could spawn a parallel universe and see what the impact of a different handling of that bug would have had. Imagine if Intel leadership had sat down and, after being told of the issue and having a real good cry, had issued a press release describing the error, stating that it was not believed to be capable of causing significant errors for the overwhelming majority of users but that this couldn't be ruled out, and offering to replace any affected processor at no charge. The total number of processors that they had to replace may or may not have been similar to what actually happened, but I think that the prestige that Intel would have garnered would have more than overshadowed those costs as people chose to use Intel because they knew that Intel would have their back.