Sun Microsystems has issued a software patch for a design glitch in its new UltraSparc III processor. Initial models of the Sun Blade 1000 workstation based on Sun's new design are affected.

In unusual circumstances, there could be problems with floating point calculations leading to data corruption. Sun's patch turns off the prefetch pipeline that predicts and retrieves the instructions most likely needed next. Sun admits, however, that the firmware update will slow down the processor's performance in some cases.

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