Prime95 can cause Intel Skylake CPUs to freeze

The bug in question can cause the system to hang under complex workloads.

The problem was discovered by power users including members of the hardwareluxx.de community and mathematicians at mersenne.org using a tool called Prime95 to calculate prime numbers using Fast Fourier Transformation. By employing tens of thousands of machines to run hand-coded assembly language 24 hours a day, this group has found all of the record prime numbers during the last 20 years.

Since the bug has been reproduced on Windows and Linux systems, and on different motherboards, that post posited that it had to be down to the Intel processor. To be fair to Intel this is not the sort of thing that most users have to bother about, but Prime95 worked fine before Skylake and there might be other situations where it might break. Specifically, the exponent 14,942,209 has been singled out as a source of crashing.

A spokesIntel has said that the outfit has identified an issue that potentially affects the 6th Gen Intel Core family of products.

Intel didn’t offer additional information about the bug, though it’s possible that the use of extremely large numbers by Prime95 causes the issue, speculated Ars Technica. Apparently the issue occurs when a system is under complex workload conditions which cause unpredictable system behavior.

While the bug was discovered using Prime95, it could affect other industries that rely on complex computational workloads, such as scientific and financial institutions. The less good news is that it takes a BIOS update to resolve the issue, so if you have an affected device, you’ll have to wait for your PC maker to work with Intel to release an update.