Flawed AMD Chip Can Lead To Data Corruption
 

Apparently AMD allowed some flawed chips to slip through their detection grid. The problem affects only a small number of chips and only single core 2.6 and 2.8 GHz CPUs.

It is believed that the glitch is triggered when the affected chip's FPU is made to loop through a series of memory-fetch, multiplication and addition operations without any condition checks on the result of the calculations. The loop has to run over and over again for long enough to cause localized heating which together with high ambient temperatures could combine to cause the result of the operation to be recorded incorrectly, leading to data corruption