Intel may have made a strange mess of things with the Cougar point chipset all those weeks ago, but it looks like AMD is taking its own turn at stumbling, although its own slip-up is quite different.
This year saw more than one company committing an error that affected it, its manufacturing partners and all or some of their customers.
The flaw in Intel's Cougar Point chipset (6-series) is one of the major ones, since it halted sales of all affected notebooks and motherboards, which were many.
Another problem was related to SSDs and their NAND Flash chips' advancement to a new manufacturing process, and how they now have lower amounts of write cycles.
Now, Advanced Micro Devices is said to have made a blunder of its own, with one of its recently launched graphics cards.
The board in question is the Radeon HD 6790 which, among other things, is supposed to have 16 ROPs enabled.
The 40nm Barts GPU (graphics processing unit) has 32 ROPs in total, but many were disabled in order to meet the card's intended performance and price targets.
However, it was found that, because of a miscommunication with foundry or board partners, or some other reason, some of the board ended up with double the ROP amount.
This means that, of the cards on sale at the moment, some may or may not feature 24 ROPs instead of 16, meaning more geometry processing power overall.
The problem was discovered with GPU-Z and, though it was thought to be a bug on the software's part at first, it really looks like the ROP count was genuine.
Amusingly enough, this isn't even the first time something of this sort happens to an AMD piece of hardware.
Some HD 6950 cards, for instance, were said, at one point, to be able to turn into 6970 by flashing the BIOS (some initial models even had all 1,120 stream processors enabled), and there is also how some dual-core or 3-core CPUs could be unlocked to quad-core ones.
