Wednesday September 29 7:38 PM ET
Intel Has Bug In Some Versions Of Pentium III
Xeon
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Intel Corp. (Nasdaq:INTC - news) said it has
discovered a bug in two versions of its Pentium III Xeon processors for the server
and workstation market, a bug that will delay the shipment of servers based on
the chip.
Intel said it is still shipping the chips -- a Pentium III Xeon with a speed of 550 megahertz and a level two
cache of 512 kilobytes, and the other with one megabyte of secondary cache. Both chips run in
configuration of eight processors on an Intel motherboard, called the Sabre. Cache is a reserved section
of memory to improve performance.
The Pentium III Xeon 550 megahertz with two megabytes of level two cache is not experiencing any
problems, Intel said.
''We expect to have the root cause and solution within the next few weeks,'' said Chuck Mulloy, an Intel
spokesman. ''We are still shipping those, but telling customers not to sell those systems and we are
not shipping them with the Sabre motherboards right now.''
Intel said that because it is continuing to ship the chip, which can be used by systems makers with
other motherboards, the flaw will not be material to its earnings.
Santa Clara, Calif.-based Intel plans to ship a so-called ''workaround,'' or bug fix, to its customers, when
it has one.
The bug appears when a system is pushed to its highest performance limit, resulting in a total system
crash, or what is referred to by some in the industry as the ''blue screen of death.''
Mulloy noted, however, that most of Intel's customers who are ordering the Pentium III Xeon 550
megahertz for servers in eight-way configurations are ordering the version with two megabytes of
secondary cache.
A Dell Computer Corp. spokesman said that Dell's PowerEdge servers use the 550 megahertz Pentium
III Xeon, but that Dell is currently only shipping the version with two megabytes of cache.
''Anything that is going to ship out is the two meg version,'' said David Brandt, a spokesman for Dell in
Round Rock, Texas. ''We announced that product in August and are shipping it next week.''
Compaq Computer Corp. (NYSE:CPQ - news) of Houston said that its ProLiant 8000 and ProLiant 8500
servers are unaffected by the Intel bug, because Compaq designs and manufactures its own 8-way
server motherboard.
''Compaq and Intel have confidently determined that the 'bug' is confined to the Intel Sabre motherboard
and there have been no problems with respect to the Compaq design,'' Compaq said in a statement.
Erika Klauer, an analyst with Deutsche Bank Alex. Brown, said in a note to clients earlier Wednesday
that the impact from the bug on Intel's earnings should be ''quite small, if not negligible.''
''It becomes clear then that a very small portion of Intel's units shipped will be affected by this problem
-- certainly fewer than 1 million,'' Klauer said. ''In addition, we would expect that this problem will be
fixed by the end of the fourth quarter, at the latest.''
This is not the first time a bug has plagued the Pentium III Xeon processor family. When the first
versions of the chip family were introduced in June of 1998, some versions had flaws with their
accompanying chip sets.
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