Difference in stepping numbers?

[Steve Kargl]

Anyone know what the difference between stepping=8 and a stepping=10
opteron processors?  When I purchased the processors I never noticed
the different values because dmesg reports only the cpu info for the
first processor, cpu0, which was stepping=8 in my case.

I've recently experienced segfaults and signal 10s during builds of
the GCC source tree.  I narrowed the problem down to a possible problem
with one of the cpus.  Well, I yanked cpu0 with stepping=8 and moved
cpu1 with stepping=10 into the location of cpu0.  Booting a UP kernel
revealed:

CPU: AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 248 (2194.48-MHz K8-class CPU)
  Origin = "AuthenticAMD"  Id = 0xf5a  Stepping = 10
  Features=0x78bfbff<FPU,VME,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,PAE,MCE,CX8,APIC,SEP,MTRR,
  PGE,MCA,CMOV,PAT,PSE36,CLFLUSH,MMX,FXSR,SSE,SSE2>
  AMD Features=0xe0500800<SYSCALL,NX,MMX+,LM,3DNow+,3DNow>

At the moment, I have not been able to generate a signal 10 or 11
under fairly heavy load on cpu with stepping=10.
 
-- 
Steve