We wrote that Intel's Nehalem has an officially listed TLB bug and we managed to get an official response from the company's representative.

"The spec clarification AAJ1 was initially added due to an issue on the Intel® Core 2 Duo processor which was previously corrected with a BIOS update; this issue does not impact the Nehalem Family of CPUs and is listed in the Nehalem spec update, as the update contains all changes that are pending for the Software Developers Manual, regardless of what processor it impacts.

To clarify that: There are five errata on the Core i7 processor that relate to the TLB. These all relate to improper translations or error reporting, and all of those that impact functionality have been fixed via BIOS updates prior to Core i7 launch. Performance changes have been negligible.”

Intel basically says that there are five errata on Core i7 processors related to TLB, but they’ve all been fixed via BIOS update before the Nehalem, Core i7 generation launched. There are not big performance differences, but this is quite hard to measure as in Phenom's TLB case you would lose a massive 10 percent when you enabled the TLB fix.

We will keep our eyes opened on this one, but so far no one has reported any troubles and crashes related to these TLB bugs and we haven’t experienced them, either.

Also read

Intel about Nehalem’s TLB errata