Errata prompts Intel to disable TSX in Haswell, early Broadwell CPUs

[zalbard]

Errata of this magnitude aren't often discovered this late in the life of a CPU core.

As is customary in such cases, Intel will disable the TSX instructions in current products using a CPU microcode update delivered via new revisions of motherboard firmware. Disabling TSX should ensure stable operation for Haswell CPUs, but those chips will no longer be capable of supporting TSX's features, including hardware lock elision and restricted transactional memory.

Source: TechReport

Remember SATA failure? While this feature isn't used by many software products, many more hardware units are affected: all Haswell, Haswell-E, and first revision of Broadwell CPUs.