The bug-in-the-Pentium saga is boiling up nastily for Intel Corp, with IBM Corp and Gateway 2000 Ltd setting out to give the impression that they will take more care of any Pentium users that might affected by the bug than Intel has promised – each is offering replacement Pentium chips to customers concerned about the floating point computational error, but only if the customer can show that the work being done requires the suspect function; then up popped a Prudential Securities analyst to say that the bug may be worse than previously reported and that the error could crop up in day-to-day use of the chip, an assertion denied by Intel; Intel denied a rumour on Wall Street that the company was planning a total recall of the bugged Pentiums; but it had to confess that replacements for the part won’t be widely available soon – the fixed version is still at the sampling stage and IBM and Hewlett-Packard Co haven’t even received samples of them yet; and according to the Wall Street Journal, Tim Coe, an engineer at Vitesse Semiconductor Corp has studied the problem and reckons it can occur in numbers of as few as five digits.
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