We were told that Intel's Nehalem, the CPU that we know as Core i7 has TLB. TLB, three letters that have destroyed the sales of Phenom and Opterons based on 65nm K10 cores, stands for Translation Lookaside Buffer, and Intel officialy states in its Intel Core i7 Processor, Extreme Edition Series and Intel Core i7 Processor - Specification Update PDF, that the CPU has a TLB bug.

If you open Intel’s official document that is nicely stored here, on page 37 AAJ1 Clarification of TRANSLATION LOOKASIDE BUFFERS (TLBS) Invalidation part, you will see that Intel says that in some rare cases improper TLB invalidation may result in unpredictable system behavior and can hang your OS or result with incorrect data. Here is the word to word quote: "In rare instances, improper TLB invalidation may result in unpredictable system behavior, such as system hangs or incorrect data. Developers of operating systems should take this documentation into account when designing TLB invalidation algorithms. For the processors affected, Intel has provided a recommended update to system and BIOS vendors to incorporate into their BIOS to resolve this issue."

We are not sure if you should be concerned, but such a thing completely destroyed K10’s reputation and we will certainly do a bit more investigating about it, and ask Intel for a comment. We would like to thank one of our readers for the tip.

Also read

Intel Core i7 Processor, Extreme Edition Series and Intel Core i7 Processor
Specification Update, November 2008