With the older chips, each core had its own TSC, which caused
synchronization problems. The Barcelona generation chips (including
your Phenom) have a constant frequency TSC on the northbridge, so they
should be immune to these problems.
If it's steadily losing a few seconds every hour, it's probably just
slightly mis-calibrated hardware. ntp should fix this right up. If the
drift is more extreme than ntp can correct for, or the drift keeps
changing, or time is jumping around, that is definitely something that
could be a bug.
It's possible that in future kernels we'll be a few clock cycles more
accurate in calibrating this on Barcelona chips, but calibration is only
as good as the standard of comparison. There will always be hardware
that's slightly off, so run ntp, or use a nightly ntpdate cronjob. If
your time starts drifting drastically or jumping around, please yell
really loud.
-- Chris
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