Re: BIOS update ? @James 100
"except, having coughed up $$$$ for a high-end chip, you were then left with lousy performance on anything maths-heavy!"
Intel did have a free replacement program for the FDIV Pentiums (after people complained loudly) and the replacements cost Intel dearly, hundreds of millions or so.
The Intel CPU erratas are not rare at all, but most seem to be about "CPU locks under some offbeat scenarios" and are in general not a problem. But the FDIV produced unreliable FP calculations and it was really simple to reproduce too. Pentiums didn't support microcode updates so this couldn't have been fixed with a BIOS update anyway. (and 20 years ago getting a BIOS updates was way, way more cumbersome to get and program than today)