CYGNUS SUPPORT FIXES PENTIUM DIVIDE FLAW
GNU COMPILER TO THE RESCUE

December 22, 1994 Mountain View, CA - Cygnus Support today announced the
public availability of a patch for the floating point divide flaw in Intel
Corp's Pentium microprocessor. Intel has been working actively with Cygnus
Support and other leading members of the software community to define and
implement a uniform, efficient software work-around for the flaw on the
current version of the Pentium microprocessor. Now that such a workaround
has been developed for the GNU compiler, application development targeting
the Pentium will work in a consistent and correct fashion.

Working closely with Intel, Cygnus was able to quickly address the needs of
the development community. "We at Cygnus Support are dedicated to the
proliferation and use of software whose source code is freely available
and redistributable," said  Michael Tiemann, Cygnus Support's President
and CEO. "The availability of source code for the GNU toolchain is the
primary reason Cygnus has been able to provide a prompt solution to Intel
and the community of software developers  targeting the Pentium
microprocessor." The result is a fix for the flaw and will be freely
available to software developers. Sources for the patch and library
functions will be available from Cygnus Support via anonymous ftp at
ftp://ftp.cygnus.com/pub/pentium-fixes.

The fix/patch includes an FDIV workaround based on identifying the divisor
and dividend for regions that can yield imprecise results. This approach
will provide the best solution with the least performance impact to the
end user. Sine, cosine and the exponentials have been proven not to be
impacted by the floating point flaw. Cygnus will include a library for
tangent, arc-tangent and the remainder, all of which use the FDIV
operation.

Cygnus Support was founded in 1989 to provide commercial support for
sourceware solutions. Sourceware is supported, centrally managed software
featuring freely redistributable source code. Cygnus provides a full range
of products and services for software developers, including site support,
custom development, and open systems solutions, in North America, Europe,
and Asia. The company is based in Mountain View, CA, with an office in
Somerville, MA.

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