---
title: "Verify Intel's own White Paper (Sharangpani & Barton 1994) directly for the FDIV table-generation script-error attribution"
type: "question"
status: "open"
date_raised: "2026-08-26T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["verification","pentium-fdiv-bug","sb94","srt-division","floating-point"]
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
---


[[claim-pentium-fdiv-bug-five-missing-srt-lookup-table-entries]] currently states, on Vaughan Pratt's authority, that Intel's own White Paper attributes the five missing lookup-table entries to "a script that incorrectly copied values" during table generation — but Pratt himself does not independently confirm this, and floats a competing hypothesis (a misapplied threshold-lowering rule) without resolving which is right. Neither hypothesis has been checked against Intel's original document.

## Why it matters

This is the load-bearing cause claim the corrected note now carries as `[unverified-mechanism — needs primary]`. Pratt is Tier 1 for his own reverse-engineering of the bug's *location* (the five missing table entries) but only Tier 2 for the *cause*, since there he is reporting someone else's document rather than his own finding.

## What to check

Fetch H.P. Sharangpani and M.L. Barton, "Statistical Analysis of Floating Point Flaw in the Pentium(TM) Processor" (Intel Corporation White Paper, November 1994) directly — cited by Pratt as [SB94] — and confirm, verbatim:

1. Does Intel's own text actually attribute the missing entries to a script-copying error, and in what words?
2. What does Intel's own document say about the average-user error-rate estimate ("once every 27,000 years"), also quoted by Pratt but not yet checked against Intel's original?
3. Does Intel's White Paper address Pratt's alternative hypothesis (a misapplied threshold-lowering rule) at all, or is that purely Pratt's own speculation?

## Notes

If Intel's original document is unreachable (no public host has been confirmed yet), a companion paper — Coe, Mathisen, Moler, Pratt, "Computational aspects of the Pentium affair," IEEE J. Computational Sci. and Eng., March 1995 [CMMP95] — may cross-check the same figures, though it shares an author with the existing Pratt source and would not independently corroborate the cause attribution.