Intel's Core 2 Is Fast, But Buggy

Over at Kernel Trap is an article on how Intel's Core 2 processor series has a number of serious bugs. Some of these Intel Core 2 bugs will even be exploitable by user-land code. While BIOS updates can address some of these problems, BIOS vendors are usually late in issuing these updates and Intel Corporation isn't so quick to help out Linux and the alternative operating systems.

OpenBSD's Theo de Raadt is even recommending users avoid the Intel Core 2 series until these bugs have been addressed, which will be at least a year. Intel's specification update file for the Intel Core 2 Duo and Intel Core 2 Extreme processors is currently 59 pages long with problems, implications, and workarounds (where available). While the Core 2 family is buggy, these CPUs do perform very nicely as we had shared in our Core 2 Duo E6400 review.