The Pentium FDIV bug is a hardware bug affecting the floating-point unit (FPU) of the early Intel Pentium processors. Because of the bug, the processor would return incorrect binary floating point results when dividing certain pairs of high-precision numbers. The bug was discovered in 1994 by Thomas R. Nicely, a professor of mathematics at Lynchburg College. Missing values in a lookup table used by the FPU's floating-point division algorithm led to calculations acquiring small errors. While these errors would in most use-cases only occur rarely and result in small deviations from the correct output values, in certain circumstances the errors can occur frequently and lead to more significant deviations.
66 MHz Intel Pentium (sSpec=SX837) with the FDIV bug
The Pentium is a x86 microprocessor introduced by Intel on March 22, 1993. It is the first CPU using the Pentium brand.
Considered the fifth generation in the 8086 compatible line of processors, its implementation and microarchitecture was internally called P5.
Intel Pentium A80501 66 MHz SX950 die image
Intel Pentium P54C die shot
Pentium MMX 166 MHz without cover
Image: KL Intel Pentium P5