Chapter 18, Problem 1TQ

Explanation of Solution

Description of Pentium chip error:

Intel, the manufacturer of the Pentium chip, initially announced that an error in operations would occur once in 9 billion divisions, or once in every 27,000 years for a typical user. That is, the probability of an error is “1 in 9 billion divisions”.

It is given that, in October 1994, a flaw was discovered in the Pentium microchip installed in personal computers.

Depending on the procedure, statistical software packages may perform an extremely large number of divisions to produce the required output. For heavy users of the software 1 billion divisions over a short time frame is not unusual...