Assessment of the applicability of COTS microprocessors in high-confidence computing systems: a case study

Commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) components are increasingly used in building high-confidence systems to assure their dependability in an affordable way. The effectiveness of such a COTS-based design critically depends on the design of the COTS components. Their dependability attributes need a thorough understanding and rigorous assessment yet has received relatively little attention. The research presented in this paper investigates the error detection and recovery features of contemporary high-performance COTS microprocessors. A method of assessment is proposed and two state-of-the-art microprocessors are studied and compared.