Who was the CEO of Intel when the Pentium FDIV bug was discovered in 1994?

Andrew Grove was Intel’s CEO when the Pentium FDIV bug was discovered in 1994.

The flaw affected the floating-point unit in early Intel Pentium processors. Under particular combinations of numbers, the chip’s division circuitry could return an incorrect result. The underlying cause was five missing values in a lookup table used by the Pentium’s SRT division algorithm, producing errors that were usually small but potentially important in scientific or financial calculations.

Mathematics professor Thomas Nicely noticed suspicious results while calculating prime-related constants in 1994. He independently contacted Intel in October and publicized the problem later that month. Intel engineers had reportedly identified the flaw earlier, but the issue became a major public controversy after the company initially offered replacement chips only to users who could demonstrate that the error affected their work.

Grove, Intel’s chief executive from 1987 to 1998, ultimately authorized a broad replacement program in December 1994. Intel recorded a pretax charge of about $475 million. Gordon Moore was Intel’s co-founder and chairman, while Craig Barrett became CEO later; Paul Otellini led Intel in a much later era.