How do we know the number of hardware design errors? With IA32, it's easier to discover these problems because the CPU is used by many people under many operating systems. IBM designs the OS and CPU, making it much easier to cover up any problems that do exist.
IA32???
Nothing in the OS is going to cover up a CPU instruction which is malfunctioning. I suppose that if a bad instruction caused a program check they could add code to intercept and correct it, but if it just gives bad results, tough.
I recently described in a posting a processor bug from some years back. They could not change the bad instruction in silicon but they put out a fix which replaced it with a millicode version that was MUCH slower than the silicon.
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