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Comment by franzb | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me of this saga I went through as an early adopter of AMD Threadripper 3970X:

https://forum.level1techs.com/t/amd-threadripper-3970x-under...

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22382946

Ended up investigating the issue with AMD for several months, was generously compensated by AMD for all the troubles (sending motherboards and CPUs back and forth, a real PITA), but the outcome is that I've been running since then with a custom BIOS image provided by AMD. I think at the end the fault was on Gigabyte's side.

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Reminded me of the Intel Skylake bug found by the OCaml compiler developers: https://tech.ahrefs.com/skylake-bug-a-detective-story-ab1ad2...

Holy cow I had no idea CPU vendors would do this for you.

When you’re not only helping them debug their own hardware but are also spending money on their ridiculously overpriced HEDT platform, it probably makes them want to keep you happy.

That is true and also lots of people use OCaml

Supermicro gave us same type of assistance. Then new feature of bifurcation did not work correctly. Without it, enterprise telecommunications peripheral that costs 10x more than 4 socket Xeon motherboard can't run at nominal speed, and it was ran on real lines, not test data.

They sent us custom BIOSes until it got stabilized and said they'll put the patch in the following BIOS releases.

The thing is neither Intel nor AMD nor Supermicro can test edge cases at max usage in niche environments without paying money, but they would really love to claim with backup they can be integrated for such solutions. If Intel wants to test stuff in space for free they have to cooperate with NASA; the alternative is in-house launch.

NASA has super-elaborate testbeds and simulators. Maybe producers can provide some format/interfaces/simulators for users, users would write test-cases for it, and give back to providers to run in-house.

If users pay seven figures+ it might make sense.

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