A possible explanation is a soft error in one of the processors internal
caches. These can be caused either by cosmic rays, or alpha decay
within the lead solder bumps. As processors incorporate more internal
cache, not only on die L1, but the 32 - 128K of other instruction
caches, the possibility of these errors increases. A study using 2MB
cache Xeon processors detected no errors at sea level equvalent cosmic
ray flux, some problems at 1 mile altitude, and serious (> 1 fault per
month) at 4 miles. Moral of the story: don't bring your laptop along
while climbing Mt Everest.
Regards,
Ethan
-----Original Message-----
[SNIP]
Conclusions:
(a) My system "glitched" once during the original run. Quite honestly
this surprised me as the system is not significantly overclocked, is
well cooled, is fitted with ECC memory and has no history of single-
bit memory errors corrected by ECC. Nor has it ever crashed, hung up
or spontaneously rebooted. Therefore I feel it's more than likely
that the glitch was memory corruption caused by a software problem.
This system is running Windows 2000 Professional ...
(b) There is no evidence of any systematic difference between Athlon
and Intel processor families which might affect the GIMPS/PrimeNet
project.
Thanks again to the participants!
Regards
Brian Beesley
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