Pipelining

 As we're talking about pipelining bugs, I think it's essential to understand pipelining.

According to an article from techopedia, Pipelining is the process of accumulating and executing computer instructions and tasks from the processor via a logical pipeline. It allows storing, prioritizing, managing, and executing tasks and instructions in an orderly process. However, sometimes different bugs affect them that affect the computer's behaviors. An example of how a pipelining bug led to unexpected computer usage and design behaviors is Pentium chips failing math. In 1994, an entire line of CPUs by market leaders couldn't do their math. The Pentium floating-point flaw ensured that no matter what software you used, your results stood a chance of being inaccurate past the eighth decimal point. The problem lay in a faulty math coprocessor, a floating-point unit. The result was a slight possibility of tiny errors in hardcore calculations, but it was a costly PR debacle for Intel.

Things went wrong because the lookup table consisted of 1,066 table entries downloaded into the programmable logic array of the chip. But only 1,061 entries made it onto the first-generation Pentiums; five got lost on the way.

 Intel's laudable idea was to triple the execution speed of floating-point calculations by ditching the previous-generation 486 processor's clunky shift-and-subtract algorithm and substituting a lookup-table approach in the Pentium, but unfortunately, things did go as planned.

In January 1995, Intel announced a pretax charge of $475 million against earnings, most of which stemmed from replacing flawed processors. The bottom line in this arithmetic mess is this: In lookup-table and money calculations, 1,066 – 5 = –$475,000,000. Any way you look at it, that's bad math.