But doesn’t that already happen? Didn’t we see that when the Pentium flaw was discovered? In fact, I thought there was an Excel spreadsheet you could download and run to test whether you had the flaw or not.
For this argument, the Pentium flaw is not the best example. As long as all CPUs were equally flawed, everything was fine, if you define 'fine' as 'we see the same results on all systems'.
I guess Excel will have the problem in some cases for rare CPUs. For 'common' ones, I expect that Excel contains workaround for errata that might affect its computations.
Well there's a difference between trusting the CPU to get arithmetic right and trusting the CPU to get sin(x) right (or to just know it gets it wrong but not caring).
